The Early Stages of Heavy Ion Collisions

Heavy ion collisions pose interesting challenges to quantum chromodynamics, because they probe the parton structure of the incoming nuclei at very small longitudinal momentum fractions. Combined with the large size of nuclei, this may lead to the phenomenon of gluon saturation. The Color Glass Condensate is an effective QCD description that aims to cope with such a situation. In this talk, I show how one may study heavy ion collisions in this framework.