Approach to the time development of parton fragmentation

Abstract: It is the central goal of our studies to describe parton fragmentation in the hot and dense medium of a quark gluon plasma (QGP). Under the assumption that the medium is not static and homogeneous, knowledge about the temporal evolution of the processes involved can be of essential importance. Therefore, parton fragmentation has been studied with a Monte-Carlo algorithm that approximates the DGLAP-evolution of fragmentation functions via a set of parton cascades. The presented work consists mainly of implementations of this kind of algorithm and the application of a simple approximation, which gives the time development of partonic cascades. As approximations to the parton-splitting processes of gluons and massless quarks in the vacuum two different schemes with the same leading-log contributions are investigated. Furthermore, the temporal evolutions of quantities related to partonic cascades have been examined: To our understanding, especially variables (like, e.g.: parton multiplicities or virtualities) that give insight, when parton splittings take place, are of great interest, as they allow identifying the parts of the fragmentation process that will be most affected by medium interactions.