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

We benchmark and then improve 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 the ZPC program 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 t -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% 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.