Non-equilibrium evolution of the disoriented chiral condensate in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

We study the dynamics of the chiral phase transition expected during the expansion of the quark-gluon plasma produced in a high energy hadron or heavy ion collision in the $O(4)$ linear sigma model to leading order in a large $N$ expansion for strong coupling constants. Starting from an approximate equilibrium configuration at an initial proper time $\tau$ in the disordered phase, we study the transition to the ordered broken symmetry phase as the system expands and cools. We give results for the proper time evolution of the effective pion mass, the order parameter $<\sigma>$ as well as for the pion two point correlation function expressed in terms of a time dependent phase space number density and pair correlation density. We investigate the possibility of disoriented chiral condensate being formed during the expansion. In order to create large domains of disoriented chiral condensates low-momentum instabilities have to last for long enough periods of time. Our simulations show that instabilities that are formed during the initial stages of the expansion survive for proper times that are at most $3\,fm/c$.