Near-Fields and Initial Energy Density in High Energy Nuclear Collisions

Nuclear collisions at high energies produce a gluon field that can be described using the Colour Glass Condensate (CGC) effective theory at proper times $\tau \lesssim 1$ fm/c. The theory can be used to calculate the gluon energy-momentum tensor, which provides information about the early time evolution of the chromo-electric and chromo-magnetic fields, energy density, longitudinal and transverse pressures, and other quantities. We obtain an analytic expression for the energy...

The initial stages of relativistic heavy ion collisions are studied numerically in the framework of a 2+1 dimensional classical Yang-Mills theory. We calculate the energy and number densities and momentum spectra of the produced gluons. The model is also applied to non central collisions. The numerical results are discussed in the light of RHIC measurements of energy and multiplicity and other theoretical calculations. Some problems of the present approach are pointed out.

We calculate the classical gluon field of a fast projectile passing through a dense medium. We show that this allows us to calculate both the initial state gluon production in proton-nucleus collisions and the final state gluon radiation off a hard parton produced in nucleus-nucleus collisions. This unified description of these two phenomena makes the relation between the saturation scale $Q_s$ and the transport coefficient $\hat q$ more transparent. Also, we discuss the vali...

An iterative proceedure is proposed to compute the classical gauge field produced in the collision of two heavy nuclei at high energy. The leading order is obtained by linearizing the Yang-Mills equations in the light-cone gauge, and provides a simple formula for gluon production in nucleus-nucleus collisions. At this order $k_t-$factorization breaks down.

We report on efforts to construct an event generator that calculates the classical gluon field generated at early times in high energy nuclear collisions. Existing approaches utilize numerical solutions of the Yang-Mills equations after the collision. In contrast we employ the analytically known recursion relation in the forward light cone. The few lowest orders are expected to lead to reliable results for times of up to the inverse saturation scale, tau_0 ~ 1/Q_s. In these p...

We investigate the space-time structure of the classical gluon field produced in an ultrarelativistic collision between color charges. The classical solution which was computed previously in a perturbative approach is shown to become unstable on account of the non-Abelian self-interaction neglected in the perturbative solution scheme. The time scale for growth of the instabilities is found to be of the order of the distance between the colliding color charges. We argue that t...

Color Glass Condensate (CGC) provides a classical description of dense gluon matter at high energies. Using the McLerran-Venugopalan (MV) model we calculate the initial energy density \epsilon(\tau) in the early stage of the relativistic nucleus-nucleus collision. Our analytical formula reproduces the quantitative results from lattice discretized simulations and leads to an estimate \epsilon(\tau=0.1fm)=40-50GeV/fm^3 in the Au-Au collision at RHIC energy. We then formulate in...

We show that a special choice of light-cone gauge can greatly simplify the calculation of the classical color field created in the initial stages of nucleus-nucleus collisions. Within this gauge, we can in particular construct explicitly the conserved color current and calculate exactly the gauge field immediately after the collision. This field is used as a boundary condition in an iterative solution of the Yang-Mills equations in the forward light-cone. In leading order, wh...

According to the Color Glass Condensate approach to relativistic heavy-ion collisions, the earliest phase of the collision is a glasma which is made of highly populated gluon fields that can be treated classically. Using a proper time expansion we study analytically various properties of the glasma. In particular, we compute the glasma energy-momentum tensor which allows us to obtain the energy density, longitudinal and transverse pressure, collective flow, and angular moment...

We extend previous work on high energy nuclear collisions in the Color Glass Condensate model to study collisions of finite ultrarelativistic nuclei. The changes implemented include a) imposition of color neutrality at the nucleon level and b) realistic nuclear matter distributions of finite nuclei. The saturation scale characterizing the fields of color charge is explicitly position dependent, $\Lambda_s=\Lambda_s(x_T)$. We compute gluon distributions both before and after...