High energy collisions of strongly deformed nuclei: An old idea with a new twist

Collisions of deformed nuclei such as U may provide 40% more hard processes and about 30% larger energy densities, compared to central PbPb collisions. They also produce excited systems which are strongly deformed in the transverse plane, which are much larger than possible in peripheral PbPb collisions. We discuss how, even without a polarized target, one can study these phenomena by selecting particular events. Collisions are studied by a simple Monte Carlo model, and it is shown what can be achieved by making cuts in two control parameters-the number of participants and ellipticity. We also discuss how UU collisions may resolve a number of outstanding issues, from corrections to hard processes to elliptic flow (the existence of a quark-gluon plasma), to the mechanism of J/ψ suppression.