Elliptic flow of colored glass in high energy heavy ion collisions

Abstract

We compute the elliptic flow generated by classical gluon fields in a high energy nuclear collision. The classical gluon fields are described by a typical momentum scale, the saturation scale Lambda_s, which is, for RHIC energies, of the order of 1-2 GeV. A significant elliptic flow is generated only over time scales on the order of the system size R. The flow is dominated by soft modes $p_T\sim Lambd{a}_s/4$ which linearize at very late times $tau\sim R\gg 1/Lambd{a}_s$. We discuss the implications of our result for the theoretical interpretation of the RHIC data.

Comments: 5 pages, 4 figures, extend discussions and add references