Initial conditions of heavy ion collisions and high energy factorization

TL;DR

This paper discusses how the Color Glass Condensate effective theory models the initial conditions of high energy heavy ion collisions, emphasizing the factorization of energy logarithms and explaining observed rapidity correlations.

Contribution

It demonstrates the factorization of leading logarithms into the small x wavefunction evolution within the Color Glass Condensate framework for heavy ion collisions.

Findings

Factorization of energy logarithms into small x wavefunction evolution

Explanation of long-range rapidity correlations at RHIC

Application of the CGC framework to initial conditions

Abstract

The Color Glass Condensate is an effective theory description for the small momentum fraction x degrees of freedom in a high energy hadron or nucleus, which can be understood in terms of strong classical gluon fields. We discuss the resulting picture of the initial conditions in a relativistic heavy ion collision. We describe recent work to show that the leading logarithms of the collision energy can be factorized into the renormalization group evolution of the small x wavefunction. We then describe how this framework can be used to understand the long range rapidity correlations observed by the RHIC experiments.