  Typically the materialization of high energetic transverse partons to
hadronic jets is assumed to occur outside the reaction zone in a relativistic
heavy ion collision. In contrast, a quantum mechanical estimate yields a time
on the order of only a few fm/c for building up the hadronic wavefunction for
jets with typical transverse momenta of pT < 10 GeV as accessible at RHIC
facilities. The role of possible elastic or inelastic collisions of these high
pT particles with the bulk of hadrons inside the fireball is addressed by means
of an opacity expansion in the number of collisions. This analysis shows that
the hadronic final state interactions can in principle account for the
modification of the (moderate) high pT spectrum observed for central collisions
at RHIC.
