Global Flow of Glasma in High Energy Nuclear Collisions

TL;DR

This paper explores the classical gluon field dynamics in high-energy nuclear collisions, predicting complex flow patterns that match experimental observations and could validate classical Yang-Mills theory in such events.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of gluon flux tube expansion and flow patterns, including rapidity-odd transverse flow, within the classical Yang-Mills framework for heavy ion collisions.

Findings

Prediction of rapidity-odd transverse flow tilting the fireball

Identification of flow patterns consistent with RHIC and LHC data

Proposal of global flow fields as tests for Yang-Mills dynamics

Abstract

We discuss the energy flow of the classical gluon fields created in collisions of heavy nuclei at collider energies. We show how the Yang-Mills analoga of Faraday's Law and Gauss' Law predict the initial gluon flux tubes to expand or bend. The resulting transverse and longitudinal structure of the Poynting vector field has a rich phenomenology. Besides the well known radial and elliptic flow in transverse direction, classical quantum chromodynamics predicts a rapidity-odd transverse flow that tilts the fireball for non-central collisions, and it implies a characteristic flow pattern for collisions of non-symmetric systems $A+B$. The rapidity-odd transverse flow translates into a directed particle flow $v_1$ which has been observed at RHIC and LHC. The global flow fields in heavy ion collisions could be a powerful check for the validity of classical Yang-Mill dynamics in high energy collisions.