Elliptic flow of colored glass in high energy heavy ion collisions

We compute the elliptic flow generated by classical gluon fields in a high energy nuclear collision. The classical gluon fields are described by a typical momentum scale, the saturation scale Λs, which is, for RHIC energies, of the order of 1–2 GeV. A significant elliptic flow is generated only over time scales on the order of the system size R. The flow is dominated by soft modes pT∼Λs/4 which linearize at very late times τ∼R⪢1/Λs. We discuss the implications of our result for the theoretical interpretation of the RHIC data.