Global Flow of Glasma in High Energy Nuclear Collisions

Abstract

We discuss the energy flow of the classical gluon fields created in collisions of heavy nuclei at collider energies. We show how the Yang-Mills analoga of Faraday's Law and Gauss' Law predict the initial gluon flux tubes to expand or bend. The resulting transverse and longitudinal structure of the Poynting vector field has a rich phenomenology. Besides the well known radial and elliptic flow in transverse direction, classical quantum chromodynamics predicts a rapidity-odd transverse flow that tilts the fireball for non-central collisions, and it implies a characteristic flow pattern for collisions of non-symmetric systems $A+B$. The rapidity-odd transverse flow translates into a directed particle flow $v_1$ which has been observed at RHIC and LHC. The global flow fields in heavy ion collisions could be a powerful check for the validity of classical Yang-Mill dynamics in high energy collisions.

7 figures

References in corpus (7)

• The Color Glass Condensate
• Some Features of the Glasma
• Energy density of the Glasma
• System-size independence of directed flow at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider
• Initial energy density and gluon distribution from the Glasma in heavy-ion collisions
• Decoherence and Entropy Production in Relativistic Nuclear Collisions
• How particles emerge from decaying classical fields in heavy ion collisions: towards a kinetic description of the Glasma

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• Lambda Polarization in an Exact Rotating and Expanding fluid dynamical model for peripheral heavy ion reactions
• Rapidity Profile of the Initial Energy Density in Heavy-Ion Collisions
• Initial Angular Momentum and Flow in High Energy Nuclear Collisions
• The impact of glasma on heavy flavor azimuthal correlations and spectra
• Early Time Dynamics of Gluon Fields in High Energy Nuclear Collisions
• Revisiting the Gluon Spectrum in the Boost-Invariant Glasma from a Semi-Analytic Approach
• Initial conditions in AA and pA collisions
• Zeroing in on the initial state -- tomography using bulk, jets and photons
• Event-By-Event Initial Conditions for Heavy Ion Collisions
• The Initial Flow of Classical Gluon Fields in Heavy Ion Collisions
• Theory @ Hard Probes 2013