Quark production in heavy ion collisions: formalism and boost invariant fermionic light-cone mode functions

We revisit the problem of quark production in high energy heavy ion collisions, at leading order in α s in the color glass condensate framework. in this first paper, we setup the formalism and express the quark spectrum in terms of a basis of solutions of the dirac equation (the mode functions). we determine analytically their initial value in the fock-schwinger gauge on a proper time surface q s τ 0 ≪ 1, in a basis that makes manifest the boost invariance properties of this problem. we also describe a statistical algorithm to perform the sampling of the mode functions.