We present results from numerical Classical Yang Mills calculations of the initial stage Glasma field configurations in a relativistic heavy ion collision. We compute the initial gluon multiplicity from RHIC to LHC energies. The initial conditions for the classical field computation are taken from a dipole model parametrization tested on HERA data, meaning that all the parameters, including the normalization and the value of the saturation scale, are fixed from DIS data.
We study the transverse momentum, $p_T$, broadening of charm and beauty quarks in the early stage of high energy nuclear collisions. We aim to compare the diffusion in the evolving Glasma fields with that of a standard, Markovian-Brownian motion in a thermalized medium with the same energy density of the Glasma fields. The Brownian motion is studied via Langevin equations with diffusion coefficients computed within perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics. We find that for small values of the saturation scale, $Q_s$, the average $p_T$ broadening in the two motions is comparable, that suggests that …
In this work, we debut a new implementation of IP-Glasma and quantify the pre-equilibrium longitudinal flow in the IP-Glasma framework. The saturation physics based IP-Glasma model naturally provides a non-zero initial longitudinal flow through its pre-equilibrium Yang-Mills evolution. A hybrid IP-Glasma+MUSIC+UrQMD frame- work is employed to test this new implementation against experimental data and to make further predictions about hadronic flow observables in Pb+Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV. Finally, the non-zero pre-equilibrium longitudinal flow of the IP-Glasma model is quantified, and its o…
We extend the impact parameter dependent Glasma model (IP-Glasma) to three dimensions using explicit small x evolution of the two incoming nuclear gluon distributions. We compute rapidity distributions of produced gluons and the early time energy momentum tensor as a function of space-time rapidity and transverse coordinates. We study rapidity correlations and fluctuations of the initial geometry and multiplicity distributions and compare to existing models for the three dimensional initial state.
We discuss differences between the IP-Glasma model and typical wounded-nucleon model like initial conditions. We point out that the IP-Glasma initial state is more compact in the transverse plane and produces a significant initial flow, both of which contribute to an increased radial flow in the subsequent hydrodynamic evolution. A larger bulk viscosity, compared to calculations that use other initial state models, is required to compensate for these effects and find agreement with experimental data. We further demonstrate the importance of the initial momentum anisotropy of the glasma for ani…
We compute initial conditions in heavy-ion collisions within the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) framework by combining the impact parameter dependent saturation model (IP-Sat) with the classical Yang-Mills description of initial Glasma fields. In addition to fluctuations of nucleon positions, this IP-Glasma description includes quantum fluctuations of color charges on the length-scale determined by the inverse nuclear saturation scale Q_s. The model naturally produces initial energy fluctuations that are described by a negative binomial distribution. The ratio of triangularity to eccentricity is…
We present an ab-initio approach to compute the longitudinal dependence of the initial state in heavy-ion collisions by including small-x evolution of the nuclear gluon distributions. Extending the IP-Glasma model by including JIMWLK rapidity evolution, we compute event-by-event rapidity distributions of produced gluons and the early time energy momentum tensor as a function of space-time rapidity and transverse coordinates. We show how the effects of small-x evolution manifest themselves in longitudinal (rapidity) correlations of event-by-event multiplicities and transverse geometry and compa…
We perform a calculation of the one- and two-point correlation functions of energy density and axial charge deposited in the glasma in the initial stage of a heavy ion collision at finite proper time. We do this by describing the initial stage of heavy ion collisions in terms of freely evolving classical fields whose dynamics obey the linearized Yang-Mills equations. Our approach allows us to systematically resum the contributions of high momentum modes that would make a power series expansion in proper time divergent. We evaluate the field correlators in the McLerran-Venugopalan model using t…
In relativistic heavy ion collisions, a highly occupied gluonic matter is created shortly after initial impact, which is in a non-thermal state and often referred to as the Glasma. Successful phenomenology suggests that the glasma evolves rather quickly toward the thermal quark-gluon plasma and a hydrodynamic behavior emerges at very early time $\sim \hat{o}(1)$ fm/c. Exactly how such "apparent thermalization" occurs and connects the initial conditions to the hydrodynamic onset, remains a significant challenge for theory as well as phenomenology. We briefly review various ideas and recent prog…
We study the diffusion of charm quarks in the early stage of high energy nuclear collisions at the RHIC and the LHC. The main novelty of the present study is the introduction of the color current carried by the heavy quarks that propagate in the evolving Glasma (Ev-Glasma), that is responsible of the energy loss via polarization of the medium. We compute the transverse momentum broadening, $σ_p$, of charm in the pre-thermalization stage, and the impact of the diffusion on the nuclear modification factor in nucleus-nucleus collisions. The net effect of energy loss is marginal in the pre-thermal…
We present an analytical calculation of the covariance of the energy-momentum tensor associated to the gluon field produced in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions at early times, the Glasma. This object involves the two-point and single-point correlators of the energy-momentum tensor ($\langle T^{μν}(x_{\perp})T^{σρ}(y_{\perp})\rangle$ and $\langle T^{μν}(x_{\perp})\rangle$, respectively) at proper time $τ\!=\!0^+$. Our approach is based on the Color Glass Condensate effective theory, which allows us to map the fluctuations of the valence color sources in the colliding nuclei to those of t…
The the initial stage of a relativistic heavy ion collision can be described by a classical color field configuration known as the Glasma. The production of quark pairs from this background field is then computed nonperturbatively by numerically solving the Dirac equation in the classical background. The result seems to point towards an early chemical equilibration of the plasma.
We simulate the 3+1 D classical Yang-Mills dynamics of the collisions of longitudinally extended nuclei, described by eikonal color charges in the Color Glass Condensate framework. By varying the longitudinal thickness of the colliding nuclei, we discuss the violations of boost invariance and explore how the boost invariant high-energy limit is approached. Subsequently, we develop a more realistic model of the three dimensional color charge distributions that connects longitudinal and transverse fluctuations to the $x$ and $k_\bot$ dependence of transverse momentum dependent parton distributio…
We present a novel formulation of the IP-Glasma initial state model in 3+1D in which the 2+1D boost invariant IP-Glasma is generalized through JIMWLK rapidity evolution of the pre-collision Wilson lines \cite{Schenke:2016ksl}. In order to consistently accommodate a non-boost-invariant system, the initial conditions are generalized to 3+1D. By breaking boost invariance, the 3+1D model no longer trivially satisfies Gauss' law at the initial time, and we now enforce it locally. We compare the time evolution of the chromo-electric and chromo-magnetic fields as well as the transverse and longitudin…
Heavy quarks, which are produced at the earliest stage of relativistic heavy-ion collisions, probe the entire history of the quark-gluon plasma that is created in the collision. Initially the plasma is populated with chromodynamic fields which can be treated as classical. We study the transport of heavy quarks across such a system, which is called glasma, using a Fokker-Planck equation where the quarks interact with long wavelength chromodynamic fields. We compute field correlators which are used to calculate the collision terms of the transport equation. Finally, the energy loss and momentum …
We study the thermalization process in classical Yang-Mills (CYM) field theory starting from noisy glasma-like initial conditions by investigating the initial-value sensitivity of trajectories. Kunihiro et al. linked entropy generation to the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy, which gives the entropy production rate in classical chaotic systems, calculated numerically for CYM fields starting from purely random initial field configurations. In contrast, we here study glasma-like initial conditions. For small random fluctuations we obtain qualitatively similar results while no entropy increase is observe…
In these proceedings, we report on our numerical lattice simulations of partons traversing the boost-invariant, non-perturbative glasma as created at the early stages of collisions at RHIC and LHC. Since these highly energetic partons are produced from hard scatterings during heavy-ion collisions, they are already affected by the first stage of the medium's time evolution, the glasma, which is the pre-equilibrium precursor state of the quark-gluon plasma. We find that partons quickly accumulate transverse momentum up to the saturation momentum during the glasma stage. Moreover, we observe an i…
We review recent work on understanding the next to leading order corrections to the classical fields that dominate the initial stages of a heavy ion collision. We have recently shown that the leading ln(1/x) divergences of these corrections to gluon multiplicities can be factorized into the JIMWLK evolution of the color charge density distributions.
The initial stage of a heavy ion collision is dominated by nonperturbatively strong chromoelectric and -magnetic fields. The spatial Wilson loop provides a gauge invariant observable to probe the dynamics of the longitudinal chromomagnetic field. We discuss recent results from a real time lattice calculation of the area-dependence of the expectation value of the spatial Wilson loop. We show that at relatively early times after the collision, a universal scaling as a function of the area emerges at large distances for very different initial conditions, with a nontrivial critical exponent. A sim…
We present our progress on simulating the Glasma in the early stages of heavy ion collisions in a non-boost-invariant setting. Our approach allows us to describe colliding nuclei with finite longitudinal width by extending the McLerran-Venugopalan model to include a parameter for the Lorentz-contracted but finite extent of the nucleus in the beam direction. We determine the rapidity profile of the Glasma energy density, which shows strong deviations from the boost invariant result. Both broad and narrow profiles can be produced by varying the initial conditions. We find reasonable agreement wh…
We study the gluon distribution in nucleus-nucleus collisions in the framework of the Color-Glass-Condensate. Approximate analytical solutions are compared to numerical solutions of the non-linear Yang-Mills equations. We find that the full numerical solution can be well approximated by taking the full initial condition of the fields in Coulomb gauge and using a linearized solution for the time evolution. We also compare kt-factorized approximations to the full solution.
The initial energy density produced in an ultrarelativistic heavy ion collision can, in the color glass condensate framework, be factorized into a product of the integrated gluon distributions of the nuclei. Although this energy density is well defined without any infrared cutoff besides the saturation scale, it is apparently logarithmically ultraviolet divergent. We argue that this divergence is not physically meaningful and does not affect the behavior of the system at any finite proper time.
We present analytic results that describe the gluon field, or glasma, at very early times after a collision of relativistic heavy ions at proper time $τ=0$. We use a Colour Glass Condensate approach, and perform an expansion in $τ$. The full details of our method are described in our previous paper [1]. In this paper we present an analysis of various physical quantities that can be obtained from the energy-momentum tensor. We show that the expansion to order $τ^6$ can be trusted to about $τ=0.05$ fm. For times small enough that the expansion converges, the transverse and longitudinal pressures…
The physics of the initial conditions of heavy ion collisions is dominated by the nonlinear gluonic interactions of QCD. These lead to the concepts of parton saturation and the Color Glass Condensate (CGC). We discuss recent progress in calculating multi-gluon correlations in this framework, prompted by the observation that these correlations are in fact easier to compute in a dense system (nucleus-nucleus) than a dilute one (proton-proton).
In this paper, I qualitatively discuss the matter formed in the fragmentation region of nuclear collisions at the highest energies. I argue that although the initial temperature and baryon number density can become very large, the ratio of initial baryon chemical potential to initial temperature is approximately independent of energy, when measured at a fixed rapidity measured from the end of the fragmentation region. This quantity is argued to be roughly invariant under expansion, and therefore the value measured at decoupling should be approximately the same as the initial value and largely …
In this work we use the IP-Glasma+MUSIC+UrQMD framework to systematically study a wide range of hadronic flow observables at 2.76 TeV. In addition to the single particle spectra and anisotropic flow coefficients $v_n$ previously studied in \cite{1609.02958}, we consider event-plane correlations, non-linear response coefficients $χ_{npq}$, and event shape engineering. Taken together, these observables provide a wealth of insight into the collective behavior of the QGP and initial state fluctuations. They shed light on flow fluctuations, flow at fixed system size but different initial geometries…
We investigate the effect of nucleon-nucleon correlations on the initial condition of ultra-central heavy ion collisions at LHC energies. We calculate the eccentricities of the MC-Glauber and IP-Glasma models in the 0--1% centrality class and show that they are considerably affected by the inclusion of such type of correlations. For an IP-Glasma initial condition, we further demonstrate that this effect survives the fluid-dynamical evolution of the system and can be observed in its final state azimuthal momentum anisotropy.
We estimate the energy density and the gluon distribution associated with the classical fields describing the early-time dynamics of the heavy-ion collisions. We first decompose the energy density into the momentum components exactly in the McLerran-Venugopalan model, with the use of the Wilson line correlators. Then we evolve the energy density with the free-field equation, which is justified by the dominance of the ultraviolet modes near the collision point. We also discuss the improvement with inclusion of nonlinear terms into the time evolution. Our numerical results at RHIC energy are fai…
Strong longitudinal color flux fields will be created in the initial stage of high-energy nuclear collisions. We investigate analytically time evolution of such boost-invariant color fields from Abelian-like initial conditions, and next examine stability of the boost-invariant configurations against rapidity dependent fluctuations. We find that the magnetic background field has an instability induced by the lowest Landau level whose amplitude grows exponentially. For the electric background field there is no apparent instability although pair creations due to the Schwinger mechanism should be …
We present a formulation of the initial state of heavy ion collisions that generalizes the 2+1D boost invariant IP-Glasma \cite{Schenke:2012wb} to 3+1D through JIMWLK rapidity evolution of the pre-collision Wilson lines. The rapidity dependence introduced by the JIMWLK evolution leads us to modify the initial condition for the gauge fields, and to solve Gauss' law iteratively in order to allow for temporal evolution on a 3-dimensional lattice. While the transverse physics of QGP has been studied nearly exhaustively, the effect of longitudinal fluctuations introduced by the JIMWLK evolution has…
Anisotropic flow coefficients v_1-v_5 in heavy ion collisions are computed by combining a classical Yang-Mills description of the early time glasma flow with the subsequent relativistic viscous hydrodynamic evolution of matter through the quark-gluon plasma and hadron gas phases. The glasma dynamics, as realized in the IP-Glasma model, takes into account event-by-event geometric fluctuations in nucleon positions and intrinsic sub-nucleon scale color charge fluctuations; the pre-equilibrium flow of matter is then matched to the MUSIC algorithm describing viscous hydrodynamic flow and particle p…
On the Role of Prompt Photons in the Anisotropic Emission of Direct Photons -- Direct Photons from Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200$ GeV with IP-Glasma Initial Condition
Institute of Particle Physics, Central China Normal University(华中师范大学粒子物理研究所)
Using the standard Lagrangian of gluons and a model of dual superconductor for magnetic monopoles, we calculate the number densities of the gluons and monopoles produced by the decay of background color electric $E$ and magnetic $B$ fields ( glasma ). We find that gluons are dominant decay products when the initial values of the gauge fields are large such that $gE=gB>(0.5\mbox{GeV})^2$, while they are suppressed and monopoles are dominant decay products when the initial values are small such that $gE=gB<(0.4\mbox{GeV})^2$. The feature of the gluon dominance at large $gE=gB$ and the monopole d…
In the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) effective field theory, colliding sheets of Colored Glass form a strongly interacting, non-equilibrium state called the Glasma. How Colored Glass shatters to form the Glasma, the properties of the Glasma, and how the Glasma thermalizes into a Quark Gluon Plasma(QGP) are questions of central interest in understanding the properties of the strongly interacting matter produced in heavy ion collisions. We argue that these questions can be addressed in the framework of field theories with strong time dependent external sources. Albeit such field theories are non-…
We discuss high energy hadronic collisions within the theory of the Color Glass Condensate. We point out that the initial electric and magnetic fields produced in such collisions are longitudinal. This leads to a novel string like description of the collisions, and a large Chern-Simons charge density made immediately after the collision. The presence of the longitudinal magnetic field suggests that essential to the description of these collisions is the decay of Chern-Simons charge.
Axial charge production at the early stage of heavy-ion collisions is investigated within the framework of real-time lattice simulations at leading order in QCD coupling. Starting from color glass condensate initial conditions, the time evolution of quantum quark fields under classical color gauge fields is computed on a lattice in longitudinally expanding geometry. We consider simple color charge distributions in Lorentz contracted nuclei that realize flux tube-like configurations of color fields carrying nonzero topological charge after a collision. By employing the Wilson fermion extended t…
Initial states of glasma in high energy heavy ion collisions are longitudinal classical color electric and magnetic fields. Assuming finite color electric conductivity, we show that the color electric field decays by quark pair production with the life time of the order of $Q_s^{-1}$, i.e. the inverse of the saturation momentum. Quarks and anti-quarks created in the pair production are immediately thermalized as far as their temperature $β^{-1}$ is lower than $Q_s$. Namely, a relaxation time of the quarks to be thermalized is much shorter than $Q_s^{-1}$ when $β^{-1} \ll Q_s$. We also show tha…
We analyze the behavior of unstable modes in the glasma produced in high energy heavy ion collisions, using a simple model with effective homogeneous longitudinal color electric and magnetic fields. The unstable modes are approximately described as Nielsen-Olesen unstable modes under the homogeneous longitudinal gauge fields. We find that the Nielsen-Olesen unstable modes show properties very similar to those of the exponentially increasing unstable modes in the glasma recently shown by Romatschke and Venugopalan. Although initial gauge fields in the glasma are much stronger than the ones in o…
We extend our previous study of a toy model for coupling classical Yang-Mills equations for describing overoccupied gluons at the saturation scale with a strongly coupled infrared sector modeled by AdS/CFT. Including propagating modes in the bulk we find that the Yang-Mills sector loses its initial energy to a growing black hole in the gravity dual such that there is a conserved energy-momentum tensor for the total system while entropy grows monotonically. This involves a numerical AdS simulation with a backreacted boundary source far from equilibrium.
The collinear color electric and magnetic fields have been discussed to be produced immediately after high energy heavy ion collisions. We discuss anomalous gluon production under the background gauge fields. The gluons are Nielsen-Olesen unstable modes. The production rate of the modes by Schwinger mechanism has recently been found to be anomalously larger than the rate of quarks or other stable gluons. Analyzing classical evolutions of the modes with initial conditions given by vacuum fluctuations, we find that their production makes the color electric field decay very rapidly. The life time…
We study the propagation of charm quarks in the early stage of high energy proton-lead collision, considering the interaction of these quarks with the evolving Glasma by means of the Wong equations. Neglecting quantum fluctuations at the initial time the Glasma is made of longitudinal fields, but the dynamics leads to a quick formation of transverse fields; we estimate such a formation time as $Δt\approx 0.1$ fm/c which is of the same order of the formation time of heavy quark pairs $t_\mathrm{formation}\approx 1/(2m)$. Limiting ourselves to the simple case of a static longitudinal geometry, w…
We study within the IP-Glasma and two-component MC-Glauber models the effects of initial state geometry and fluctuations on multiplicities and eccentricities for several collision species at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). These include copper-gold (Cu+Au), gold-gold (Au+Au), and uranium-uranium (U+U) collisions. The multiplicity densities per participant pair are very similar in all systems studied. Ellipticities vary strongly between collision systems, most significantly for central collisions, while fluctuation driven odd moments vary little between systems. Event-by-event distr…