Parton Cascades in High-Energy Nuclear Collisions

This is a review of the parton cascade model (PCM) which provides a QCD-based description of nucleus-nucleus reactions at very high energy. The PCM describes the collision dynamics within the early and dense phase of the reaction in terms of the relativistic, probabilistic transport of perturbative excitations (partons) of the QCD vacuum, combined with the renormalization group flow of the parton virtuality. The current state of numerical implementations of the model, as well as its predictions for nuclear collisions at RHIC and LHC are discussed.