Poincare-covariant parton cascade model for ultrarelativistic heavy-ion reactions - art. no. 064903

We present a new cascade-type microscopic simulation of nucleus-nucleus col lisions at RHIC energies. The basic elements are partons (quarks and gluons ) moving in 8N-dimensional phase space according to Poincare-covariant dyna mics. The parton-parton scattering cross sections used in the model are com puted within perturbative QCD in the tree-level approximation. The Q(2) dep endence of the structure functions is included by an implementation of the DGLAP mechanism suitable for a cascade, so that the number of partons is no t static, but varies in space and time as the collision of two nuclei evolv es. The resulting parton distributions are presented, and meaningful compar isons with experimental data are discussed.