Saturation in nuclei

Abstract

This talk discusses some recent studies of gluon saturation in nuclei. We stress the connection between the initial condition in heavy ion collisions and observables in deep inelastic scattering (DIS). The dominant degree of freedom in the small x nuclear wavefunction is a nonperturbatively strong classical gluon field, which determines the initial condition for the glasma fields in the initial stages of a heavy ion collision. A correlator of Wilson lines from the same classical fields, known as the dipole cross section, can be used to compute many inclusive and exclusive observables in DIS.

7 pages, 3 figures. Talk given at EDS'09: 13th International Conference on Elastic and Diffractive Scattering, CERN, Geneva, 29th June-3rd July, 2009