The quark-hadron phase transition in weakly isospin-asymmetric nuclear matter

Abstract

We consider the transition from quark to hadronic matter which may result during the cooling/expansion of the quark-gluon plasma formed in energetic collisions of weakly isospin-asymmetric ions. This transition involves the energy density of u and d quark matter and the one of nearly isospin-symmetric nuclear matter. Within bag models, the former entails knowledge of the bag pressure, a poorly constrained quantity. The bag pressure at high density can be fixed imposing equality of quark and nucleonic energy densities at the (assumed known) transition point. We find this value to be very model dependent.