Elliptic flow from a parton cascade

Abstract

The dependence of elliptic flow at RHIC energies on the effective parton scattering cross section is calculated using the ZPC parton cascade model. We show that the v 2 measure of elliptic flow saturates early in the evolution before the hadronization transition to a rather large value ∼0.05–0.15 as σ g varies from 2–10 mb and thus is a sensitive probe of the dynamics in the plasma phase.