Classical chromodynamics and heavy ion collisions

This paper is a slightly modified version of the introductory part of a doctoral dissertation also containing the articles hep-ph/0303076, hep-ph/0409328 and hep-ph/0409058. The paper focuses on the calculation of particle production in a relativistic heavy ion collision using the McLerran-Venugopalan model. The main part of the paper summarizes the background of these numerical calculations. First we relate this calculation of the initial stage af a heavy ion collision to our understanding of the whole collision process. Then we discuss the saturation physics of the small x wavefunction of a hadron or a nucleus. The classical field model of Kovner, McLerran and Weigert is then introduced before moving to discuss the numerical algorithms used to compute gluon and quark pair production in this model. Finally we shortly review the results on gluon and quark-antiquark production obtained in the three articles mentioned above.