Elliptic flow of colored glass in high energy heavy ion collisions

Abstract

We compute the elliptic flow generated by classical gluon fields in a high energy nuclear collision. The classical gluon fields are described by a typical momentum scale, the saturation scale Lambda_s, which is, for RHIC energies, of the order of 1-2 GeV. A significant elliptic flow is generated only over time scales on the order of the system size R. The flow is dominated by soft modes $p_{T} \sim Lambda_s / 4$ which linearize at very late times $tau \sim R \gg 1/Lambda_s$. We discuss the implications of our result for the theoretical interpretation of the RHIC data.