  High-pT hadrons produced in hard collisions and detected inclusively bear
peculiar features: (i) they originate from jets whose initial virtuality and
energy are of the same order; (ii) such jets are rare and have a very biased
energy sharing among the particles, namely, the detected hadron carries the
main fraction of the jet energy. The former feature leads to an extremely
intensive gluon radiation and energy dissipation at the early stage of
hadronization, either in vacuum or in a medium. As a result, a leading hadron
must be produced on a short length scale. Evaluation within a model of
perturbative fragmentation confirms the shortness of the production length.
This result is at variance with the unjustified assumption of long production
length, made within the popular energy loss scenario. Thus we conclude that the
main reason of suppression of high-pT hadrons in heavy ion collisions is the
controlled by color transparency attenuation of a high-pT dipole propagating
through the hot medium. Adjusting a single parameter, the transport
coefficient, we describe quite well the data from LHC and RHIC for the
suppression factor R_{AA} as function of pT, collision energy and centrality.
We observe that the complementary effect of initial state interaction causes a
flattening and even fall of R_{AA} at large pT. The azimuthal anisotropy of
hadron production, calculated with no further adjustment, also agrees well with
data at different energies and centralities.
