Wilson line correlator in the MV model: relating the glasma to deep inelastic scattering

Abstract

In the color glass condensate framework the saturation scale measured in deep inelastic scattering of high energy hadrons and nuclei can be determined from the correlator of Wilson lines in the hadron wavefunction. These same Wilson lines give the initial condition of the classical field computation of the initial gluon multiplicity and energy density in a heavy ion collision. In this paper the Wilson line correlator in both adjoint and fundamental representations is computed using exactly the same numerical procedure as has been used to calculate gluon production in a heavy ion collision. In particular the discretization of the longitudinal coordinate has a large numerical effect on the relation between the color charge density parameter g2μ and the saturation scale Qs. Our result for this relation is Qs≈0.6g2μ, which results in the classical Yang–Mills value for the “gluon liberation coefficient” c≈1.1.