Domain Wall Bubbles in High Energy Heavy Ion Collisions

Abstract

It has been recently shown that meta-stable domain walls exist in high-density QCD ($\mu\neq 0$) as well as in QCD with large number of colors ($N_c\to\infty$), with the lifetime being exponentially long in both cases. Such metastable domain walls may exist in our world as well, especially in hot hadronic matter with temperature close to critical. In this paper we discuss what happens if a bubble made of such wall is created in heavy ion collisions, in the mixed phase between QGP and hadronic matter. We show it will further be expanded to larger volume $\sim 20 fm^3$ by the pion pressure, before it disappears, either by puncture or contraction. Both scenarios leave distinctive experimental signatures of such events, negatively affecting the interference correlations between the outgoing pions.