Signatures of Moat Regimes in Heavy-Ion Collisions

Abstract

Heavy-ion collisions at small beam energies have the potential to reveal the rich phase structure of QCD at nonzero temperature and density. Among the possible phases are regimes which feature periodic modulations of the spatial structure, where the energy spectrum is shaped like a moat, with the minimum of the energy over a sphere at nonzero momentum. We argue that if the matter created in heavy-ion collisions traverses such a regime, it can produce a characteristic momentum dependence of particle number and their correlations. As an explicit example, we consider a quantum pion liquid phase to compute these quantities on the freeze-out surface. These results can serve as a first guideline for a systematic search of spatially modulated phases in heavy-ion collisions.

5 pages, 3 figures; matches the published version. v3: corrected acknowledgements for RDP

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Cited by in corpus (25)

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• Search for the QCD Critical Point in High Energy Nuclear Collisions
• Remarks on nuclear matter: how an ${\omega }_0$ condensate can spike the speed of sound, and a model of $Z(3)$ baryons
• Particle Interferometry in a Moat Regime
• Ripples of the QCD Critical Point
• Soft modes in hot QCD matter
• The QCD moat regime and its real-time properties
• Inhomogeneous phases in the chirally imbalanced $2+1$-dimensional Gross-Neveu model and their absence in the continuum limit
• Absence of inhomogeneous chiral phases in 2+1-dimensional four-fermion and Yukawa models
• Four-quark scatterings in QCD I
• Regularization effects in the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model: Strong scheme dependence of inhomogeneous phases and persistence of the moat regime
• Structure formation during phase transitions in strongly interacting matter
• Inhomogeneous condensation in the Gross-Neveu model in noninteger spatial dimensions $1\le d<3$. II. Nonzero temperature and chemical potential
• Inhomogeneous condensation in the Gross-Neveu model in noninteger spatial dimensions $1\le d<3$
• When cold, dense quarks in 1+1 and 3+1 dimensions are not a Fermi liquid
• Spatially oscillating correlation functions in $\left(2+1\right)$-dimensional four-fermion models: The mixing of scalar and vector modes at finite density
• Dilepton production from moaton quasiparticles
• Modified dilepton production rate from charged pion-pair annihilation in the inhomogeneous chiral condensed phase
• Thermal fluctuations on the freeze-out surface of heavy-ion collisions and their impact on particle correlations
• Chiral vortex-line liquid of three-dimensional interacting Bose systems with moat dispersion
• Dissecting the moat regime at low energies I: Renormalization and the phase structure
• Cosmology from Strong Interactions
• Low energy physics of interacting bosons with a moat spectrum, and the implications for condensed matter and cold nuclear matter
• Detecting inhomogeneous chiral condensation from the bosonic two-point function in the $(1+1)$-dimensional Gross-Neveu model in the mean-field approximation