The Colour Glass Condensate
Abstract
We present a comprehensive introduction to the Colour Glass Condensate (CGC) effective theory, a first-principles framework for hadronic interactions in high-energy Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) at large parton densities. The focus is on the underlying physical picture and associated emergent phenomena, such as gluon saturation, transverse momentum broadening, and geometric scaling. We introduce the key components of the CGC formalism: the semiclassical approximation for dense gluon systems at saturation, the nonlinear JIMWLK equation governing the energy evolution of multi-gluon correlations, and its mean-field approximation, the BK equation. The formalism is illustrated through applications to selected "dilute-dense" processes, namely high-energy electron-nucleus and proton-nucleus collisions. Finally, we briefly discuss advanced topics including higher-order radiative corrections, the Langevin formulation of the JIMWLK equation, and the emergence of transverse-momentum-dependent (TMD) factorisation from the CGC effective theory.
Related
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- Comparative Study of Color Glass Condensate and Collinear Frameworks for Large-Transverse-Momentum Semi-Inclusive Deep Inelastic Scattering
BibTeX
@misc{iancu2026colour,
title = {{The Colour Glass Condensate}},
author = {Edmond Iancu},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.07842},
eprint = {2611.07842},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07842},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The Colour Glass Condensate
AU - Edmond Iancu
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/05
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.07842
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07842
AB - We present a comprehensive introduction to the Colour Glass Condensate (CGC) effective theory, a first-principles framework for hadronic interactions in high-energy Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) at large parton densities. The focus is on the underlying physical picture and associated emergent phenomena, such as gluon saturation, transverse momentum broadening, and geometric scaling. We introduce the key components of the CGC formalism: the semiclassical approximation for dense gluon systems at saturation, the nonlinear JIMWLK equation governing the energy evolution of multi-gluon correlations, and its mean-field approximation, the BK equation. The formalism is illustrated through applications to selected "dilute-dense" processes, namely high-energy electron-nucleus and proton-nucleus collisions. Finally, we briefly discuss advanced topics including higher-order radiative corrections, the Langevin formulation of the JIMWLK equation, and the emergence of transverse-momentum-dependent (TMD) factorisation from the CGC effective theory.
ER -