Parton Cascade Description of Heavy-Ion Collisions at CERN ?

There seems to be a general consensus now that a first glimpse of a QGP-like effect has become visible in the beautiful NA50 data on J/\psi production and the `anomalous supression' phenomenon. On the other hand, it is still widely believed that the dynamics of heavy-ion collisions at CERN SPS energy is predominantly governed by soft, non-perturbative physics. This is ironic: after all, it is unlikely that a QGP could be formed if the underlying dynamics were essentyially soft, rather than that it requires intense quark-gluon production with sufficient cascade-like reinteractions which drive the matter to large density and equilibrium. Therefore, I advocate in this contribution that for ultra-relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions a description based on the pQCD interactions and cascade evolution of involved partons can and should be used, owing to the claim that short-range parton interactions play an important role at sufficiently high beam energies, including CERN energy sqrt(s) = 20 A GeV. Here mini-jet production which liberates of quarks and gluons cannot be considered as an isolated rare phenomenon, but can occur quite copiously and may lead to complex multiple cascade-type processes.Comment: Proceedings for Quark Matter 97; 4 pages including 6 postscript figure

Comment on Transverse Mass Dependence of Partonic Dilepton Production in Ultra-Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

Comment on scale breaking effects in dilepton emission from partons during the early stage of ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisionsComment: 6 pages, RevTe

Scaling of particle production with number of participants in high-energy A+A collisions in the parton-cascade model

In view of the recent WA98 data of pi0 spectra from central Pb+Pb collisions at the CERN SPS, we analyze the production of neutral pions for A+$collisions across the periodic table at sqrt(s)=17 AGeV and 200 AGeV within the framework of the parton-cascade model for relativistic heavy ion collisions. The multiplicity of the pions (having pT > 0.5 GeV/c) in the central rapidity region, is seen to scale as \sim (N_part)^alpha, where N_part$ is the number of participating nucleons, which we have approximated as 2A for central collisions of identical nuclei. We argue that the deviation of \alpha (\simeq 1.2) from unity may have its origin in the multiple scattering suffered by the partons. We also find that the constant of proportionality in the above scaling relation increases substantially in going from SPS to RHIC energies. This would imply that the (semi)hard partonic activity becomes a much cleaner signal above the soft particle production at the higher energy of RHIC, and thus much less dependent on the (lack of) understanding of the underlying soft physics background.Comment: 4 pages including 2 postscript figure

Multiple parton interactions in high-density QCD matter

Multiple interactions of quarks and gluons in high-energy heavy-ion collisions may give rise to interesting phemomena of color charges propagating in high-density QCD matter. We study the dynamics of multi-parton systems produced in nucleus-nucleus collisions at energies corresponding the the CERN SPS and the future BNL RHIC experiments. Due to the complexity of the multi-particle dynamics we choose to employ the parton cascade model in order to simulate the development of multiple parton scatterings and associated stimulated emision processes. Our results indicate a non-linear increase with nuclear mass A of, e.g., parton multiplicity, energy density, strangeness, and contrast a linear A-scaling as in Glauber-type approaches. If multiple interactions are suppressed and only single parton scatterings (no re-interactions) are considered, we recover such a linear behavior. It remains to be studied whether these results on the parton level can be experimentally seen in final-state observables, such as the charged particle multiplicity, the magnitude of produced transverse energy, or the number of produced strange hadrons.Comment: 15 pages including 9 postscript figure

Condensation of a Strongly Interacting Parton Plasma into a Hadron Gas in High Energy Nuclear Collisions

We examine the effects of color screening on the transition of a parton plasma into a hadron gas at RHIC energies. It is found that as expected, color screening posed itself as a significant barrier for hadronization. Parton-hadron conversion would therefore be delayed and prolonged when compared to that occuring in a vacuum. Due to the on-going expansion, the resulting hadron densities are lowered. Parton equilibration is also shown to be seriously disrupted in the process.Comment: 4 pages, 2 embedded EPS figures, talk presented at Quark Matter'99, Torino, Ital

Dynamic Gluon Confinement in High Energy Processes within Effective QCD Field Theory

An effective Lagrangian approach to describe the dynamics of confinement and symmetry breaking in the process of quark-gluon to hadron conversion is proposed. The deconfined quark and gluon degrees of freedom of the perturbative QCD vacuum are coupled to color neutral condensate fields representing the non-perturbative vacuum with broken scale and chiral symmetry. As a first application the evolution of gluons emitted by a fragmenting high energy $q\bar q$ pair from the perturbative to the non-perturbative regime with confinement is studied. For reasonable parameter choice the solution of the equations of motion leads to flux tube configurations with a string tension $t \simeq 1$ GeV/fm.Comment: CERN-TH. 7409/94, 9 pages, 4 figures, postscript encoded with uufile

Comment on: "Transverse-Mass M⊥M_\perp Dependence of Dilepton Emission from Preequilibrium and Quark-Gluon Plasma in High Energy Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions"

In a recent Letter, Geiger presents calculations of the dilepton emission from the early stage of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions using the parton cascade model (PCM). He shows that the $M_\perp$ scaling is not observed. In this Comment, we point out that this is largely due to a defect in the PCM.Comment: 3 pages, LaTex, LBL-3526

Flash of photons from the early stage of heavy-ion collisions

The dynamics of partonic cascades may be an important aspect for particle production in relativistic collisions of nuclei at CERN SPS and BNL RHIC energies. Within the Parton-Cascade Model, we estimate the production of single photons from such cascades due to scattering of quarks and gluons q g -> q gamma, quark-antiquark annihilation q qbar -> g gamma, or gamma gamma, and from electromagnetic brems-strahlung of quarks q -> q gamma. We find that the latter QED branching process plays the dominant role for photon production, similarly as the QCD branchings q -> q g and g -> g g play a crucial role for parton multiplication. We conclude therefore that photons accompanying the parton cascade evolution during the early stage of heavy-ion collisions shed light on the formation of a partonic plasma.Comment: 4 pages including 3 postscript figure