The CGC and the Glasma: Two Lectures at the Yukawa Institute

These lectures present the theory of the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) and the Glasma in an elementary and intuitive manner. This matter controls the high energy limit of QCD. The CGC is the universal limit for the components of a hadron wavefunction important for high energy scattering processes. It is a highly coherent, extremely high energy density ensemble of gluon states. The Glasma is matter produced in the collision of CGCs of two hadrons. It has properties much different from those of the CGC, and is produced in a very short time after the collision. It eventually evolves from the the Color Glass Condensate initial conditions into a Quark Gluon Plasma. We can visualize the collision of two high energy hadrons as shown in Fig. 1. Before the collision, two hadrons appear as Lorentz contracted sheets approaching one another at near light speed. These we will later describe as two sheets of Colored Glass. In a very short time, the sheets of Color Glass interpenetrate one another. This we think of as the initial singularity for the collision. This is of course not a real singularity for finite collision energy, but we will see it becomes one in the limit of infinite energy. After the initial singularity, a Glasma is formed. This is composed of highly coherent gluon fields of very high energy density. If we imagine that the sheets of Colored Glass have passed through one another largely intact, the Glasma forms in the region between the receding sheets. As time goes on, the Glasma evolves into a Quark Gluon Plasma, and eventually into a gas of ordinary hadrons. These lectures are about the earliest stages of these collisions, and will describe neither the Quark Gluon Plasma nor the Hadron Gas. I will motivate the CGC and Glasma from simple physical considerations, and provide a sketchy derivation from QCD. There will be some discussion of experimental tests of these ideas.