Quark production in heavy ion collisions: Formalism and boost invariant fermionic light-cone mode functions

Abstract

We revisit the problem of quark production in high energy heavy ion collisions, at leading order in αs in the color glass condensate framework. In this first paper, we setup the formalism and express the quark spectrum in terms of a basis of solutions of the Dirac equation (the mode functions). We determine analytically their initial value in the Fock-Schwinger gauge on a proper time surface Qsτ0 ≪ 1, in a basis that makes manifest the boost invariance properties of this problem. We also describe a statistical algorithm to perform the sampling of the mode functions.