Initial state, parton saturation and thermalization

The early time behavior of heavy ion collisions involves new forms of matter such as the Color Glass Condensate and the Glasma. An area of much recent work involves attempts to understand the development of the Glasma into a thermalized Quark Gluon Plasma. The evolution of the Glasma involves turbulent Yang-Mills fields, and might also have condensates and non-trivial topological excitations. The proton-nucleus collision experiments at the LHC accelerator may provide unique insight into these forms of matter and the role they play at various times in hadronic collisions. I introduce and review aspects of these forms of matter as related to experiments at the LHC and RHIC accelerators.