Scaling of particle production with number of participants in high-energy A+A collisions in the parton-cascade model

In view of the recent WA98 data of π ⁰ spectra from central Pb + Pb collisions at the CERN SPS, we analyze the production of neutral pions for A + A collisions across the periodic table at ? and 200 AGeV within the framework of the parton-cascade model for relativistic heavy ion collisions. The multiplicity of the pions (having p _T > 0.5 GeV) in the central rapidity region, is seen to scale as ∼ ( N _part) ^α, where N _part is the number of participating nucleons, which we have approximated as 2 A for central collisions of identical nuclei. We argue that the deviation of α (≅ 1.2) from unity may have its origin in the multiple scattering suffered by the partons. We also find that the constant of proportionality in the above scaling relation increases substantially in going from SPS to RHIC' energies. This would imply that the (semi)hard partonic activity becomes a much cleaner signal above the soft particle production at the higher energy of RHIC, and thus much less dependent on the (lack of) understanding of the underlying soft physics background.