Non-perturbative effects in a rapidly expanding quark-gluon plasma

Abstract

Within first-order phase transitions, we investigate the pre-transitional effects due to the nonperturbative, large-amplitude thermal fluctuations which can promote phase mixing before the critical temperature is reached from above. In contrast with the cosmological quark-hadron transition, we find that the rapid cooling typical of the RHIC and LHC experiments and the fact that the quark-gluon plasma is chemically unsaturated suppress the role of non-perturbative effects at current collider energies. Significant supercooling is possible in a (nearly) homogeneous state of quark gluon plasma.