https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-025-01523-7
Review
Effective theories for nuclei at high energies
Fakultät für Physik, Universität Bielefeld, Universitätstraße 25, 33615, Bielefeld, Germany
a
garcia@physik.uni-bielefeld.de
Received:
11
December
2024
Accepted:
18
February
2025
Published online:
17
March
2025
We discuss the application of the Color Glass Condensate (CGC), an effective field theory of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), to describe high-energy nuclear interactions. We first provide an introduction to the methods and language of the CGC, its role in understanding gluon saturation in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC and RHIC, and its relevance in various scattering processes such as Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS). The application of the CGC effective field theory to describe hadron-hadron collisions is discussed in the scope of asymmetric dilute-dense collisions, and Heavy-Ion Collisions in the dense-dense limit. The review covers theoretical foundations, recent advancements, and phenomenological applications, focusing on using the CGC to determine the initial conditions of heavy-ion collisions.
© The Author(s) 2025
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
