Colour glass condensate at RHIC

Abstract

The colour glass condensate formalism and its application to high-energy heavy-ion collisions at RHIC are discussed. We argue that the RHIC data support the view that the colour glass condensate provides the initial conditions for gold–gold collisions at RHIC while final-state (quark–gluon–plasma) effects are responsible for the high pt physics in mid-rapidity. At forward-rapidities in deuteron–gold collisions, however, the colour glass condensate is the underlying physics of the observed suppression of the particle spectra and their centrality dependence INT-PUB 04-07.