Yang-Mills Radiation in Ultra-relativistic Nuclear Collisions

Abstract

The classical Yang-Mills radiation computed in the McLerran-Venugopalan model is shown to be equivalent to the gluon bremsstrahlung distribution to lowest order in pQCD. The classical distribution is also shown to match smoothly onto the conventional pQCD mini-jet distribution at a scale characteristic of the initial parton transverse density of the system. The atomic number and energy dependence of that scale is computed from available structure function information. The limits of applicability of the classical Yang-Mills description of nuclear collisions at RHIC and LHC energies are discussed.