The physics of strong color fields in nucleons and nuclei at high energies

Sub-femtoscopic snapshots of hadrons and nuclei reveal hadrons and nuclei at high energies to be a strongly correlated system of wee gluons. Remarkably, universal properties of this novel many-body regime of the strong interactions can be computed systematically using weak coupling techniques, and can be tested in deeply inelastic scattering and hadronic collisions. Understanding the properties of these strong color fields, besides being of intrinsic interest, is essential to complete our understanding of the decoherence and thermalization of quark-gluon matter in heavy ion collisions.