Inconsistencies in Models for RHIC and LHC

Abstract

The interpretation of experimental results at RHIC and in the future also at LHC requires very reliable and realistic models. Considerable effort has been devoted to the development of such models during the past decade, many of them being heavily used in order to analyze data. It is the purpose of this paper to point out serious inconsistencies in the above-mentioned approaches. We will demonstrate that requiring theoretical self-consistency reduces the freedom in modeling high energy nuclear scattering enormously. We will introduce a fully self-consistent formulation of the multiple-scattering scheme in the framework of a Gribov-Regge type effective theory. In addition, we develop new computational techniques which allow for the first time a satisfactory solution of the problem in the sense that calculations of observable quantities can be done strictly within a self-consistent formalism.