Scattering of shock waves in QCD

Abstract

The cross section of heavy-ion collisions is represented as a double functional integral with the saddle point being the classical solution of the Yang-Mills equations with boundary conditions/sources in the form of two shock waves corresponding to the two colliding ions. I develop the expansion of this classical solution in powers of the commutator of the Wilson lines describing the colliding particles and calculate the first two terms of the expansion.

Comments: 23 pages, 13 figures