Elliptic flow from a parton cascade

The dependence of elliptic flow at RHIC energies on the effective parton scattering cross section is calculated using the ZPC parton cascade model. We show that the v2 measure of elliptic flow saturates early in the evolution before the hadronization transition to a rather large value ∼0.05–0.15 as σg varies from 2–10 mb and thus is a sensitive probe of the dynamics in the plasma phase.