Toward Initial Conditions of Conserved Charges Part I: Spatial Correlations of Quarks and Antiquarks

TL;DR

This paper investigates the spatial correlations of quarks and antiquarks produced in high-energy collisions within the color glass condensate framework, aiming to improve initial conditions for hydrodynamic models.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed calculation of spatial correlation functions among quarks and antiquarks, including single- and double-pair production mechanisms, in heavy-ion collisions.

Findings

Rich correlation structures in transverse coordinate space

Different mechanisms dominate at various length scales

Explicit results for quark-antiquark correlations in single-pair production

Abstract

In this paper, we study the spatial correlations among quarks and antiquarks produced at mid-rapidity by gluon pair production in the color glass condensate framework. This paper is the first part of a series in which we calculate a complete set of quark/quark, quark/antiquark, and antiquark/antiquark spatial correlation functions in heavy-light ion collisions, with the goal of incorporating their conserved charges into the initial conditions of hydrodynamics. The physical mechanisms captured in this calculation include geometric, entanglement, and interaction-mediated correlations. In this first paper, we construct the building blocks for the correlations arising from single- and double-pair production, studying in detail the single-pair case and the general features of the double-pair case. We find a rich correlation structure in transverse coordinate space, with different mechanisms dominating over different length scales, and we present explicit results for the quark-antiquark correlations in the single-pair production regime. We reserve a detailed discussion of the double-pair production regime for the next paper in this sequence.