Gluon production in the Color Glass Condensate model of collisions of ultrarelativistic finite nuclei Original Research Article

We extend previous work on high energy nuclear collisions in the Color Glass Condensate model to study collisions of finite ultrarelativistic nuclei. The changes implemented include (a) imposition of color neutrality at the nucleon level and (b) realistic nuclear matter distributions of finite nuclei. The saturation scale characterizing the fields of color charge is explicitly position-dependent, Λs=Λs(xT). We compute gluon distributions both before and after the collisions. The gluon distribution in the nuclear wavefunction before the collision is significantly suppressed below the saturation scale when compared to the simple McLerran–Venugopalan model prediction, while the behavior at large momentum pT⪢Λs remains unchanged. We study the centrality dependence of produced gluons and compare it to the centrality dependence of charged hadrons exhibited by the RHIC data. We demonstrate the geometrical scaling property of the initial gluon transverse momentum distributions for different centralities. Classical Yang–Mills results for pT<Λs are simply matched to perturbative QCD computations for pT>Λs—the resulting energy per particle is significantly lower than the purely classical estimates. Our results for nuclear collisions can be used as initial conditions for quantitative studies of the further evolution and possible equilibration of hot and dense gluonic matter produced in heavy ion collisions. Finally, we study pA collisions within the classical framework. Our results agree well with previously derived analytical results in the appropriate kinematical regions.