Seminars in Hadronic Physics

Fluctuating glasma initial conditions and flow in heavy-ion collisions

Björn Schenke

Brookhaven National Laboratory

I present results for fluctuating initial conditions in heavy-ion collisions within the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) framework. These are obtained 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. I present results for initial eccentricities and flow coefficients obtained after evolution with viscous relativistic hydrodynamics, comparing to other commonly used models for the initial state. Furthermore, I show the classical Yang-Mills evolution of the initial Glasma fields prior to the thermalization time and discuss the possibility to incorporate longitudinal quantum fluctuations that will lead to instabilities, which can potentially isotropize the medium, providing the transition to the observed hydrodynamic behavior.