Quark-Gluon Plasma Freeze-out from a Supercooled State?

Abstract

We consider time-scales of first-order deconfinement or chiral-symmetry restoring phase transition in high energy heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC energies. Recently it was shown that the system must supercool below $T_c$ before the nucleation of hadronic bubbles is sufficiently rapid to overcome the expansion rate. It is shown here that the expected time-scales of high energy heavy ion reactions are sufficiently short to prevent the reheating of the system to near $T_c$. If quark-gluon plasma is produced in these collisions, it may have to hadronize from a supercooled state and the hadrons produced during rehadronization may freeze-out almost immediately.