McGill.CA / Science / Department of Physics

Seminar in Hadronic Physics

The Initial Phase in High Energy Nuclear Collisions:
How Far Can We Go With Analytic Solutions?

Rainer J. Fries

Cyclotron Insitute
and
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Texas A&M University

Color Glass Condensate (CGC) is believed to be the correct effective description of QCD in collisions of hadrons and nuclei at asymptotically large energies. In recent years CGC has been used to calculate the initial phase of heavy ion collision. This is followed by the rapid creation of quark gluon plasma (QGP) close to local kinetic equilibrium, which subsequently can be described through the application of dissipative fluid dynamics. In particular the IP glasma model stands out as a numerical implementation of CGC, which serves to initialize the subsequent fluid phase. Calculations using IP glasma have been very successful when compared to data from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In this talk I will advocate that additional insight into the underlying physical mechanisms can be gained from analytic solutions to the CGC problem at early times. Using recursive solutions to the pertinent Yang-Mills equations we analyze the early field strength and energy momentum tensors in the system. We then discuss how the features we find translate into dissipative fluid dynamics and possibly into observables. We also give a preview of a semi-analytic event generator based on these ideas.

Thursday, November 3rd 2016, 14:30
Ernest Rutherford Physics Building, R.E. Bell Conference Room (room 103)