Global flow of glasma in high energy nuclear collisions
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We discuss the energy flow of the classical gluon fields created in collisions of heavy nuclei at collider energies. We show how the Yang-Mills analog of Faraday's Law and Gauss' Law predicts the initial gluon flux tubes to expand or bend. The resulting transverse and longitudinal structure of the Poynting vector field has a rich phenomenology. Besides the well-known radial and elliptic flow in transverse direction, classical quantum chromodynamics predicts a rapidity-odd transverse flow that tilts the fireball for non-central collisions, and it implies a characteristic flow pattern for collisions of non-symmetric systems A+. B. The rapidity-odd transverse flow translates into a directed particle flow v1 which has been observed at RHIC and LHC. The global flow fields in heavy ion collisions could be a powerful check for the validity of classical Yang-Mills dynamics in high energy collisions. 2013 Elsevier B.V.