Quark production in heavy ion collisions I. Formalism and boost invariant fermionic light-cone mode functions

Understand

We revisit the problem of quark production in high energy heavy ion collisions, at leading order in $\alpha_s$ in the color glass condensate framework.

• In this first paper, we setup the formalism and express the quark spectrum in terms of a set of mode functions of the Dirac equation.
• We determine analytically their initial value in the Fock-Schwinger gauge on a proper time surface $Q_s\tau_0\ll 1$, in a basis which makes manifest the boost invariance properties of this problem.
• We also describe a statistical algorithm to perform the sampling of the mode functions.