Small x physics and RHIC data

Understand

This is a review of applications of the Color Glass Condensate to the phenomenology of relativistic heavy ion collisions.

• The initial stages of the collision can be understood in terms of the nonperturbatively strong nonlinear glasma color fields.
• We discuss how the CGC framework can and has been used to compute properties of the initial conditions of AA collisions.
• In particular this has led to recent progress in understanding multiparticle correlations, which can provide a directly observable signal of the properties of the initial stage of the collision process.