Initial Conditions and Global Event Properties from Color Glass Condensate

Abstract

Perturbative unitarization from non-linear effects is thought to deplete the gluon density for transverse momenta below the saturation scale. Such effects also modify the distribution of gluons produced in heavy-ion collisions in transverse impact parameter space. I discuss some of the consequences for the initial conditions for hydrodynamic models of heavy-ion collisions and for hard ``tomographic'' probes. Also, I stress the importance of realistic modelling of the fluctuations of the valence sources for the small-x fields in the impact parameter plane. Such models can now be combined with solutions of running-coupling Balitsky-Kovchegov evolution to obtain controlled predictions for initial conditions at the LHC.

Comments: 7 pages, 2 figures; to appear in the proceedings of the RIKEN BNL Research Center Workshop on "Saturation, the Color Glass Condensate and Glasma: What Have we Learned from RHIC?", May 10-12, 2010; to be published in Nucl. Phys. A