I present a brief discussion of the different approaches to the study initial state effects in heavy ion collisions in view of the recent results from Pb+Pb and p+p collisions at the LHC.
It is possible to define a general initial state for a quantum field by introducing a contribution to the action defined at an initial-time boundary. The propagator for this theory is composed of two parts, one associated with the free propagation of fields and another produced by the operators of this initial action. The derivation of this propagator is shown for the case of a translationally and rotationally invariant initial state. In addition to being able to treat more general states, these techniques can also be applied to effective field theories that start from an initial time. The eigenstates of a theory with interacting heavy and light fields are different from the eigenstates of the theory in the limit where the interactions vanish. Therefore, a product of states of the noninteracting heavy and light theories will usually contain excitations of the heavier state once the interactions are included. Such excitations appear as nonlocal effects in the effective theory, which are suppressed by powers of the mass of the heavy field. By appropriately choosing the initial action, these excitations can be excised from the state leaving just effects that would be produced by a local action of the lighter fields.
We present a brief review of recent theoretical developments and related phenomenological approaches for understanding the initial state of heavy-ion collisions, with emphasis on the Color Glass Condensate formalism.
We derive a new method for initial-state collinear showering in Monte-Carlo event generators which is based on the use of unintegrated parton correlation functions. Combined with a previously derived method for final-state showering, the method solves the problem of treating both the hard scattering and the evolution kernels to be used in arbitrarily non-leading order. Although we only treat collinear showering, so that further extensions are needed for QCD, we have discovered several new results: (1) It is better to generate exact parton kinematics in the hard scattering rather than with the subsequent parton showering, and similarly at each step of the showering. (2) Parton showering is then done conditionally on the exact energy-momentum of the initiating parton. (3) We obtain a factorization for structure functions in terms of parton correlation functions so that parton kinematics can be treated exactly from the beginning. (4) We obtain two factorization properties for parton correlation functions, one in terms of ordinary parton densities and one, suitable for event generation, in terms of parton correlation functions themselves.
The status of theoretical predictions for top-quark pair production at hadron colliders is reviewed, focusing on the total cross section, differential distributions, and the description of top-quark production and decay including off-shell effects.
Two important initial-state nuclear effects in hadron-nucleus collisions are considered. The ratios of inclusive differential cross sections for Drell-Yan dimuon production are calculated. The calculated results are compared to the E866 data. It is shown that consideration of multiple soft rescatterings of incident quarks in nuclei and initial-state quark energy loss effects allow to get a good agreement between the calculated results and the experimental data.