Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

In this paper, we study the spatial correlations among quarks and antiquarks produced at mid-rapidity by gluon pair production in the color glass condensate framework. This paper is the first part of a series in which we calculate a complete set of quark/quark, quark/antiquark, and antiquark/antiquark spatial correlation functions in heavy-light ion collisions, with the goal of incorporating their conserved charges into the initial conditions of hydrodynamics. The physical mechanisms captured in this calculation include geometric, entanglement, and interaction-mediated correlations. In this first paper, we construct the building blocks for the correlations arising from single- and double-pair production, studying in detail the single-pair case and the general features of the double-pair case. We find a rich correlation structure in transverse coordinate space, with different mechanisms dominating over different length scales, and we present explicit results for the quark-antiquark correlations in the single-pair production regime. We reserve a detailed discussion of the double-pair production regime for the next paper in this sequence.