Abstract:
We study the microscopic dynamics of quarks
and gluons in
relativistic heavy ion collisions in the
framework of the
Parton Cascade Model. We use lowest order
perturbative QCD
cross sections with fixed lower momentum
cutoff p_0. We
calculate the time-evolution of the
Debye-screening mass for
Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s)=200 GeV per
nucleon pair. The
screening mass is used to determine a lower
limit for the
allowed range of p_0. We also determine the
energy density
reached through hard and semi-hard processes
at RHIC, obtain
a lower bound for the rapidity density of
charged hadrons
produced by semihard interactions, and
analyze the extent of
perturbative rescattering among partons.