  The computation of hard processes in hadronic collisions is a major success
of perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (pQCD). In such processes, pQCD not only
predicts the hard reaction itself, but also the subsequent evolution in terms
of parton branching and radiation, leading to a parton shower and ultimately to
an observable jet of hadrons. If the hard process occurs in a heavy-ion
collision, a large part of this evolution takes place in the soft medium
created along with the hard reaction. An observation of jets in heavy-ion
collision thus allows a study of medium-modified QCD shower evolution. In
vacuum, Monte-Carlo (MC) simulations are well established tools to describe
such showers. For jet studies in heavy-ion collisions, MC models for in-medium
showers are currently being developed. However, the shower-medium interaction
depends on the nature of the microscopic degrees of freedom of the medium
created in a heavy-ion collision which is the very object one would like to
investigate. This paper presents a study in comparison between three different
possible implementations for the shower-medium interaction, two of them based
on medium-induced pQCD radiation, one of them a medium-induced drag force, and
shows for which observables differences between the three scenarios become
visible. We find that while single hadron observables such as R_AA are
incapable of differentiating between the scenarios, jet observables such as the
longiudinal momentum spectrum of hadrons in the jet show the potential to do
so.
