The early stages of a high energy heavy ion collision

Abstract

At high energy, the gluon distribution in nuclei reaches large densities and eventually saturates due to recombinations, that play an important role in heavy ion collisions at RHIC and the LHC. The Color Glass Condensate provides a framework for resumming these effects in the calculation of observables. In this talk, I present its application to the description of the early stages of heavy ion collisions.

Comments: 8 pages, 14 figures, proceedings of the Rutherford Centennial Conference on Nuclear Physics, August 2011, Manchester, UK