Initial conditions and charged multiplicities in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions

At ultra-relativistic energies the minijet production in heavy-ion collisions becomes sensitive to semi-hard parton rescatterings in the initial stages of the process. As a result global characteristics of the event, like the initial minijet density, become rather insensitive on the infrared cutoff that separates hard and soft interactions. This allows to define a nearly parameter-free {\it saturation cutoff} at which the initial conditions may be computed. As an application we study the centrality dependence of the charged particle multiplicity, which is compared with present RHIC data and predicted at higher energies.