Simulating collisions of thick nuclei in the color glass condensate framework

Abstract

We present our work on the simulation of the early stages of heavy-ion collisions with finite longitudinal thickness in the laboratory frame in $3+1$ dimensions. In particular we study the effects of nuclear thickness on the production of a glasma state in the McLerran-Venugopalan model within the color glass condensate framework. A finite thickness enables us to describe nuclei at lower energies, but forces us to abandon boost invariance. As a consequence, random classical color sources within the nuclei have to be included in the simulation, which is achieved by using the colored particle-in-cell method. We show that the description in the laboratory frame agrees with boost-invariant approaches as a limiting case. Furthermore we investigate collisions beyond boost invariance, in particular the pressure anisotropy in the glasma.