The Proximal Chiral Phase Transition

Abstract

We consider the form of the chiral symmetry breaking piece of the effective potential in the linear sigma model. Surprisingly, it allows for a second local minimum at both zero and finite temperature. Even though chiral symmetry is not exact, and therefore is not restored in a true phase transition at finite temperature, this second minimum can nevertheless mimic many of the effects of a first order phase transition. We derive a lower limit on the height of the second minimum relative to the global minimum based on cosmological considerations; this limit is so weak as to be practically nonexistent. In high energy nuclear collisions, it may lead to observable effects in Bose-Einstein interferometry due to domain walls and to coherent pion emission.

21 pages (LATEX), 6 figures in postscript (uuencoded, compressed tar file included at the end of the paper), NSF-ITP-94-28, NUC-MINN-94/3-T

References in corpus (9)

• Static and Dynamic Critical Phenomena at a Second Order QCD Phase Transition
• Emergence of Coherent Long Wavelength Oscillations After a Quench: Application to QCD
• Effective Hadron Dynamics: From Meson Masses to the Proton Spin Puzzle
• How to Make Large Domains of Disoriented Chiral Condensate
• Larger Domains of Disoriented Chiral Condensate Through Annealing
• QCD and the Chiral Critical Point
• Scaling of Pseudo-Critical Couplings in Two-Flavour QCD
• Dynamics of a Disoriented Chiral Condensate
• On semi-classical pion production in heavy ion collisions

Cited by in corpus (7)

• The Search for the Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Susceptibilities, the Specific Heat and a Cumulant in Two-Flavour QCD
• Physics and Signatures of the Quark - Gluon Plasma
• Baryon - Antibaryon Production by Disordered Chiral Condensates
• Forming a Single, Large, DCC Domain in a Heavy-Ion Collision
• Chiral Dynamics with Quark Degrees of Freedom
• Canonical Ensemble of Initial States Leading to Chiral Fluctuations