Initial conditions of heavy ion collisions and high energy factorization

Abstract

The Color Glass Condensate is an effective theory description for the small momentum fraction x degrees of freedom in a high energy hadron or nucleus, which can be understood in terms of strong classical gluon fields. We discuss the resulting picture of the initial conditions in a relativistic heavy ion collision. We describe recent work to show that the leading logarithms of the collision energy can be factorized into the renormalization group evolution of the small x wavefunction. We then describe how this framework can be used to understand the long range rapidity correlations observed by the RHIC experiments.