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Register a new userThe initial state of heavy-ion collisions
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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.
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In hydrodynamicalmodeling of heavy-ion collisions the initial state spatial anisotropies translate into momentum anisotropies of the final state particle distributions. Thus, understanding the origin of the initial anisotropies and quantifying their uncertainties is important for the extraction of specific QCD matter properties, such as viscosity, from the experimental data. In this work we study the wounded nucleon approach in the Monte Carlo Glauber model framework, focusing especially on the uncertainties which arise from the modeling of the nucleon-nucleon interactions between the colliding nucleon pairs and nucleon-nucleon correlations inside the colliding nuclei. We compare the black disk model and a probabilistic profile function approach for the inelastic nucleon-nucleon interactions, and study the effects of initial state correlations using state-of-theart modeling of these.
Four models for the initial conditions of a fluid dynamic description of high energy heavy ion collisions are analysed and compared. We study expectation values and event-by-event fluctuations in the initial transverse energy density profiles from Pb-Pb collisions. Specifically, introducing a Fourier-Bessel mode expansion for fluctuations, we determine expectation values and two-mode correlation functions of the expansion coefficients. The analytically solveable independent point-sources model is compared to an initial state model based on Glauber theory and two models based on the Color Glass Condensate framework. We find that the large wavelength modes of all investigated models show universal properties for central collisions and also discuss to which extent general properties of initial conditions can be understood analytically.
High-energy nuclear collisions produce a nonequilibrium plasma of quarks and gluons which thermalizes and exhibits hydrodynamic flow. There are currently no practical frameworks to connect the early particle production in classical field simulations to the subsequent hydrodynamic evolution. We build such a framework using nonequilibrium Greens functions, calculated in QCD kinetic theory, to propagate the initial energy-momentum tensor to the hydrodynamic phase. We demonstrate that this approach can be easily incorporated into existing hydrodynamic simulations, leading to stronger constraints on the energy density at early times and the transport properties of the QCD medium. Based on (conformal) scaling properties of the Greens functions, we further obtain pragmatic bounds for the applicability of hydrodynamics in nuclear collisions.
It was argued in arXiv:1805.09342 and arXiv:1807.00825 that the systematics of the azimuthal anisotropy coefficients $v_{2,3}$ measured in ultrarelativistic light-heavy ion collisions at RHIC and the LHC can be described in an initial state dilute-dense Color Glass Condensate (CGC) framework. We elaborate here on the discussion in these papers and provide further novel results that strengthen their conclusions. The underlying mathematical framework and numerical techniques employed are very similar to those in the CGC based IP-Glasma model used previously as initial conditions for heavy-ion collisions. The uncertainties in theory/data comparisons for small systems are discussed, with unknowns that are specific to the model distinguished from those that are generic to all models. We present analytical arguments that demonstrate that quantum interference effects such as Bose enhancement and Hanbury-Brown-Twiss correlations of gluons, as well as coherent multiple scattering of gluons in the projectile off color domains in the target, are enhanced in rare events. The quantum origins of the large anisotropies in small systems are corroborated by numerical results for deuteron-gold collisions that show that large anisotropies in rare configurations can occur when the nucleons in the projectile overlap significantly. This is at variance with the classical intuition of hydrodynamical models. We also comment on the consequences of ignoring the many-body color charge correlations of gluons in models that only consider geometrical fluctuations in the energy density.
There are interesting parallels between the physics of heavy ion collisions and cosmology. Both systems are out-of-equilibrium and relativistic fluid dynamics plays an important role for their theoretical description. From a comparison one can draw interesting conclusions for both sides. For heavy ion physics it could be rewarding to attempt a theoretical description of fluid perturbations similar to cosmological perturbation theory. In the context of late time cosmology, it could be interesting to study dissipative properties such as shear and bulk viscosity and corresponding relaxation times in more detail. Knowledge and experience from heavy ion physics could help to constrain the microscopic properties of dark matter from observational knowledge of the cosmological fluid properties.
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