A Poincar\'e-Covariant Parton Cascade Model for Ultrarelativistic Heavy-Ion Reactions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Poincaré-covariant microscopic simulation model for ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions, incorporating dynamic parton distributions based on perturbative QCD and DGLAP evolution.

Contribution

It develops a novel cascade model that treats partons with Poincaré covariance and includes dynamic QCD-based parton evolution during nucleus-nucleus collisions.

Findings

Parton distributions are successfully modeled and compared with existing models.

The model incorporates Q^2 dependence via DGLAP in a cascade framework.

Results show realistic evolution of parton densities during collisions.

Abstract

We present a new cascade-type microscopic simulation of Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions at RHIC energies. The basic elements are partons (quarks and gluons) moving in 8N-dimensional phase space according to Poincar\'e-covariant dynamics. The parton-parton scattering cross sections used in the model are computed within perturbative QCD in the tree-level approximation. The $Q^2$ dependence of the structure functions is included by an implementation of the DGLAP mechanism suitable for a cascade, so that the number of partons is not static, but varies in space and time as the collision of two nuclei evolves. The resulting parton distributions are presented and compared to distributions obtained with the VNI model.