Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
8188569 | Physics Letters B | 2013 | 5 Pages |
Abstract
We discuss the energy flow of the classical gluon fields created in collisions of heavy nuclei at collider energies. We show how the Yang-Mills analog of Faradayʼs Law and Gaussʼ Law predicts the initial gluon flux tubes to expand or bend. The resulting transverse and longitudinal structure of the Poynting vector field has a rich phenomenology. Besides the well-known radial and elliptic flow in transverse direction, classical quantum chromodynamics predicts a rapidity-odd transverse flow that tilts the fireball for non-central collisions, and it implies a characteristic flow pattern for collisions of non-symmetric systems A+B. The rapidity-odd transverse flow translates into a directed particle flow v1 which has been observed at RHIC and LHC. The global flow fields in heavy ion collisions could be a powerful check for the validity of classical Yang-Mills dynamics in high energy collisions.
Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering
Physics and Astronomy
Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Authors
Guangyao Chen, Rainer J. Fries,