The earliest phase of relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

According to the Color Glass Condensate approach to relativistic heavy-ion collisions, the earliest phase of the collision is a glasma which is made of highly populated gluon fields that can be treated classically. Using a proper time expansion we study analytically various properties of the glasma. In particular, we compute the glasma energy-momentum tensor which allows us to obtain the energy density, longitudinal and transverse pressure, collective flow, and angular momentum. We also study the role of the glasma in jet quenching by computing collisional energy loss and transverse momentum broadening.