English

Effectiveness of parton cascade in solving the relativistic Boltzmann equation in a box

Nuclear Theory 2025-08-01 v1 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We benchmark the ZPC parton cascade with an exact analytical solution of the relativistic Boltzmann equation for a homogeneous and massless gas with a constant and isotropic elastic cross section. We measure the accuracy of ZPC with the relative mean deviation between its momentum distribution and the exact solution. We use two generalized collision schemes to further improve the accuracy of ZPC over the recent tt-minimum collision scheme. We find that ZPC can reproduce very well the time evolution of the single-particle distribution function for the exact solution's initial condition, with one generalized collision scheme giving an accuracy better than 1%1\% for the momentum distribution at any time in all studied cases, including very high opacities where naively the parton cascade approach is expected to fail.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.23107,
  title  = {Effectiveness of parton cascade in solving the relativistic Boltzmann equation in a box},
  author = {Todd Mendenhall and Zi-Wei Lin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.23107},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

7 pages, 5 figures