Anisotropy of the semi-classical gluon field of a large nucleus at high energy

Abstract

The McLerran-Venugopalan model describes a highly boosted hadron/nucleus as a sheet of random color charges which source soft classical Weizsäcker-Williams gluon fields. We show that due to fluctuations, individual configurations are azimuthally anisotropic. We present initial evidence that impact parameter dependent small-x JIMWLK resummation preserves such anisotropies over several units of rapidity. Finally, we compute the first four azimuthal Fourier amplitudes of the S-matrix of a fundamental dipole in such background fields.

Comments: 8 pages, 6 figures; results on JIMWLK evolution were added; version accepted to Phys. Rev. D