  In this paper we study the energy loss of jets in the QGP via the nuclear
modification factor $R_{\textrm{AA}}$ for unidentified particles at high
$p_{\textrm{T}}$ ($\gtrsim 10 \textrm{GeV}/c$) in and out of the reaction plane
of the collision. We argue that at such a high $p_{\textrm{T}}$ there are no
genuine flow effects and, assuming that the energy loss is only sensitive to
initial characteristics such as the density and geometry, find that
$R_{\textrm{AA}}$ depends linearly on the (RMS) length extracted from Glauber
simulations. Furthermore we observe that for different centrality classes the
density dependence of the energy loss enters as the square root of the charged
particle multiplicity normalized to the initial overlap area. The energy loss
extracted for RHIC and LHC data from the $R_{\textrm{AA}}$ is found to exhibit
a universal behavior.
