Saturation of Elliptic flow at RHIC: Results from the covariant elastic parton cascade model MPC
Abstract
Differential elliptic flow and particle spectra are calculated using the MPC elastic parton cascade model for Au+Au at Ecm ~ 130A GeV out to p_T ~ 5 GeV/c. The evolution is computed from the parton transport theory, followed by hadronization either via independent fragmentation or by imposing parton-hadron duality. With typical few mb elastic cross sections, very large initial gluon densities, dN/deta ~ 15000, are required to reproduce the preliminary data of STAR and PHENIX at RHIC. Alternatively, the data can be reproduced assuming more moderate dN/deta ~ 1000, but with much larger elastic cross sections. In addition, we show that the computed spectra and elliptic flow are very sensitive to the numerical particle subdivision necessary to retain Lorentz covariance. Computationally demanding parton subdivisions of ~ 100-1000 are required to obtain reliable solutions to the ultra-relativistic transport equation for initial conditions expected at RHIC.Keywords
All Related Versions
This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: