Initial conditions of heavy ion collisions and small x

TL;DR

This paper reviews how the Color Glass Condensate framework models the initial conditions of heavy ion collisions, explaining particle production and correlations observed at RHIC and LHC energies.

Contribution

It discusses the application of the CGC and glasma concepts to initial collision conditions and their implications for heavy ion phenomenology.

Findings

CGC provides a first-principles approach to initial conditions

Explains long-range rapidity correlations in experiments

Connects classical glasma fields to observed phenomena

Abstract

The Color Glass Condensate (CGC), describing the physics of the nonlinear gluonic interactions of QCD at high energy, provides a consistent first-principles framework to understand the initial conditions of heavy ion collisions. This talk reviews some aspects of the initial conditions at RHIC and discusses implications for LHC heavy ion phenomenology. The CGC provides a way compute bulk particle production and understand recent experimental observations of long range rapidity correlations in terms of the classical glasma field in the early stages of the collision.