Some features of the glasma Original Research Article

We discuss high energy hadronic collisions within the theory of the color glass condensate. We point out that the initial electric and magnetic fields produced in such collisions are longitudinal. This leads to a novel string like description of the collisions, and a large Chern–Simons charge density made immediately after the collision. The presence of the longitudinal magnetic field suggests that essential to the description of these collisions is the decay of Chern–Simons charge.