1996/04/01 by Raju Venugopalan
Physics and Astronomy · #hep-ph #nucl-th
published as Comments Nucl.Part.Phys. 22 (1997) 113-130 · 22 pages in LATEX, to appear in ``Comments in nuclear and particle physics"
arxiv created 1996/04/01 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
At the colliders RHIC and LHC, nuclei at the ultrarelativistic energies of 100 GeV/A and 2.7 TeV/A will be smashed together with the hope of creating an elusive and short-lived state of matter called the quark gluon plasma. The initial conditions which determine the dynamical evolution of the quark gluon matter formed in the central region after the collision depend crucially on the small x component of the nuclear wavefunction before the collision. In this comment, we discuss recent work which argues that, for large nuclei, weak coupling techniques in QCD can be used to calculate the distribution of these small x, or wee, partons. The ramifications of this approach for the dynamics of heavy ion collisions and the various signatures of a quark gluon phase of matter are discussed.