Probing a Color Glass Condensate in High Energy Heavy Ion Collisions

At very high energies, the partons in the nuclear wavefunction form a color glass condensate. Since the occupation number of partons in the color glass condensate is large, classical methods can be used to compute multi-particle production in the initial instants of a high energy heavy ion collision. Non-perturbative expressions are derived relating the distributions of produced partons to those of wee partons in the wavefunctions of the colliding nuclei. The time evolution of components of the stress–energy tensor is studied and the impact parameter dependence of elliptic flow is extracted. We discuss the space-time picture that emerges and interpret the RHIC data within this framework.