Revisiting the Gluon Spectrum in the Boost-Invariant Glasma from a Semi-Analytic Approach

TL;DR

This paper revisits the gluon spectrum in the early stages of heavy-ion collisions using a semi-analytic solution to classical Yang-Mills equations, revealing a near-thermal spectrum with dominant electric field contributions.

Contribution

It introduces a new formula for the gluon spectrum consistent with energy density and analyzes the time evolution of different momentum modes in the Glasma.

Findings

Chromo-electric fields dominate the gluon spectrum.

Large momentum modes equilibrate faster than small ones.

Gluon spectrum approaches a near-thermal distribution with effective temperatures 0.6-0.9 Q_s.

Abstract

In high energy heavy-ion collisions, the degrees of freedom at the very early stage can be effectively represented by strong classical gluonic fields within the Color Glass Condensate framework. As the system expands, the strong gluonic fields eventually become weak such that an equivalent description using the gluonic particle degrees of freedom starts to become valid. We revisit the spectrum of these gluonic particles by solving the classical Yang-Mills equations semi-analytically with the solutions having the form of power series expansions in the proper time. We propose a different formula for the gluon spectrum which is consistent with energy density during the whole time evolution. We find that the chromo-electric fields have larger contributions to the gluon spectrum than the chromo-magnetic fields do. Furthermore, the large momentum modes take less time to reach the weak-field regime while smaller momentum modes take more time. The resulting functional form of the gluon spectrum is exponential in nature and the spectrum is close to a thermal distrubtion with effective temperatures around $0.6$ to $0.9\, Q_s$ late in the Glasma evolution. The sensitiveness of the gluon spectrum to the infrared and the ultraviolet cut-offs are discussed.