Disorienting the Chiral Condensate at the QCD Phase Transition

Abstract

I sketch how long wavelength modes of the pion field can be amplified during the QCD phase transition. If nature had been kinder, and had made the pion mass significantly less than the critical temperature for the transition, then this phenomenon would have characterized the transition in thermal equilibrium. Instead, these long wavelength oscillations of the orientation of the chiral condensate can only arise out of equilibrium. There is a simple non-equilibrium mechanism, plausibly operational during heavy ion collisions, which naturally amplifies these oscillations. The characteristic signature of this phenomenon is large fluctuations in the ratio of the number of neutral pions to the total number of pions in regions of momentum space, that is in phase space in a detector. Detection in a heavy ion collision would imply an out of equilbrium chiral transition.