Seminar in Hadronic Physics

From color glass to glasma and plasma

Tuomas Lappi

Brookhaven National Laboratory

The color glass condensate provides a good framework for understanding the small x part of the nuclear wavefunction at high energy. Consequently it provides the initial conditions for the little bang created in a relativistic heavy ion collision. In this talk I will discuss some aspects of the classical gluon fields present during the first fraction of a fermi of the collision, concentrating in particular on recent interest in the initial energy density and eccentricity. I will also outline ongoing attempts to go beyond the leading order classical description of particle production.