DYNAMICS OF PARTON CASCADES IN HIGHLY RELATIVISTIC NUCLEAR COLLISIONS

We present a fully relativistic space-time approach for the simulation of highly-energetic nucleus-nucleus collisions. The model incorporates the idea of the factorization of short-range parton-parton interactions and the hadronization process. The nuclear collisions are described by the time evolution of the parton distributions in phase space according to a relativistic transport-equation with a collision term that embodies the structure of parton-parton collisions and associated parton emission processes as calculated in the framework of perturbative QCD. We have studied A + A collisions from p + p up to U-238 + U-238 at center-of-mass energies of 100 GeV/A and 200 GeV/A. Results for the time evolution of parton multiplicities, transverse energy production, rapidity and p(perpendicular-to) distributions are presented.