Toward the semiclassical theory of high energy heavy ion collisions Original Research Article

Sudden deposition of energy at the early stage of high energy heavy ion collisions makes virtual gluon fields real. The same is true for virtual vacuum fields under the topological barrier, excited to real states at or above the barrier, gluomagnetic clusters of particular structure related to the sphalerons of the electroweak theory. Semiclassically, these states play the role of the “turning points”. After being produced they explode into a spherical shell of coherent field which then turn into several outgoing gluons. Furthermore, this explosions promptly produce quark pairs, as seen from explicit solution of the Dirac equation. The masses of such clusters depend on their size, and are expected to peak at M∼3 GeV. After we briefly review those concepts in a non-technical manner, we discuss what observable consequences the production of such clusters would make in the context of heavy ion collisions, especially at the RHIC energies. We discuss entropy and especially quark production, event-by-event fluctuations in collective effects like radial and elliptic flows and J/ψ suppression. Coherent fields and their geometry increase the jet quenching, and we also point out the existence of “explosive edge” which jump-start collective effects and may affect unusual phenomena seen at RHIC at large pt.