Within the next-to-leading order (NLO) perturbative QCD (pQCD) parton model, suppression of away-side hadron spectra associated with a high pT photon due to parton energy loss is studied in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. Dictated by the shape of the γ-associated jet spectrum in NLO pQCD, hadron spectra at large zT = p h T /p γ T > ∼ 1 are more sensitive to parton energy loss and therefore are dominated by surface emission of γ-associated jets, whereas small zT hadrons mainly come from fragmentation of jets with reduced energy which is controlled by the volume emission. These lead to different centrality dependence of the γ-hadron suppression for different values of zT . Therefore, a complete measurement of the suppression of γ-triggered hadron spectra, including its dependence on the orientation of the γ-hadron pair with respect to the reaction plane, allows the extraction of the spatial distribution of jet quenching parameters, achieving a true tomographic study of the quark-gluon plasma in high-energy heavy-ion collisions.PACS numbers: 12.38. Mh, 24.85.+p; Jet quenching [1] or suppression of large p T hadrons, caused by parton energy loss due to strong interaction between jets and the dense medium, has become a powerful tool for the study of properties of the quark-gluon plasma [2] in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. Experimental studies of jet quenching include suppression of single [3,4], dihadron (back-to-back) [5] and γ-hadron spectra. The strong suppression of large p T single hadron spectra and its centrality dependence at the Relativistic Heavy-ion Collider (RHIC) [3,5], indicate a picture of surface emission of jets. Most of jets, initially produced at the center of collisions, undergo large amount of energy loss and do not contribute to the final observed large p T hadron spectra. High p T dihadrons, on the other hand, come not only from jet pairs close and tangential to the surface of the dense medium but also from punch-through jets originating from the center of the system [6], leading to their increased sensitivity to the initial gluon density as compared to single hadrons.We will focus in this paper on the study of γ-triggered away-side hadron spectra in heavy-ion collisions within the next-to-leading order (NLO) perturbative QCD (pQCD) parton model. Since a photon does not interact in QCD with the dense medium, its energy approximately reflects that of the initial jet in γ-jet events prior to jet propagation through the medium. One can therefore study the medium modification of the full jet fragmentation function (FF) [7,8]. By selecting γ-hadron pairs with different values of z T = p h T /p γ T , which could be larger than 1 due to radiative correction in NLO pQCD, one can effectively control hadron emission from different regions of the dense medium and therefore extract the corresponding jet quenching parameters.Within pQCD parton model, the NLO corrections (α e α 2 s ) to photon and photon-hadron production cross sections include 1-loop corrections to 2 → 2 tree level processes and 2 → 3...