Time-Dependent Observables in Heavy Ion Collisions I: Setting up the Formalism

TL;DR

This paper adapts the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism to study heavy-ion collisions, calculating gluon correlations and exploring the transition from classical fields to quasi-particles, with implications for kinetic theory and free-streaming behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a higher-order formalism for gluon correlations in heavy-ion collisions, analyzing rescattering effects and their dependence on proper time ordering.

Findings

Reproduces Boltzmann equation results for certain time orderings.

Finds different behavior consistent with free-streaming in other regimes.

Highlights the need for further diagrammatic analysis in $\

Abstract

We adapt the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism to study heavy-ion collisions in perturbative QCD. Employing the formalism, we calculate the two-point gluon correlation function $G_{22}^{a\mu,b\nu}$ due to the lowest-order classical gluon fields in the McLerran-Venugopalan model of heavy ion collisions and observe an interesting transition from the classical fields to the quasi-particle picture at later times. Motivated by this observation, we push the formalism to higher orders in the coupling and calculate the contribution to $G_{22}^{a\mu,b\nu}$ coming from the diagrams representing a single rescattering between two of the produced gluons. We assume that the two gluons go on mass shell both before and after the rescattering. The result of our calculation depends on the ordering between the proper time of the rescattering $\tau_Z$ and the proper time $\tau$ when the gluon distribution is measured. For (i) $\tau_Z\gg 1/Q_s$ and $\tau-\tau_Z\gg 1/Q_s$ (with $Q_s$ the saturation scale) we obtain the same results as from the Boltzmann equation. For (ii) $\tau-\tau_Z\gg \tau_Z\gg 1/Q_s$ we end up with a result very different from kinetic theory and consistent with a picture of "free-streaming" particles. Due to the approximations made, our calculation is too coarse to indicate whether the ordering (i) or (ii) is the correct one: to resolve this controversy, we shall present a detailed diagrammatic calculation of the rescattering correction in the $\varphi^4$ theory in the second paper of this duplex.