The quark condensate in relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions

Abstract

We compute the modification of the quark condensate $<\bar{q} q>$ in relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions and estimate the 4-volume, where the quark condensate is small ($<\bar{q}q>/<\bar{q} q>_0\leq$ 0.1--0.3) using hadron phase-space distributions obtained with the quark-gluon string model. As a function of the beam energy the 4-volume rises sharply at a beam energy $E_{lab}/A \simeq$ (2--5) GeV, remains roughly constant up to beam energies $\simeq 20$ GeV and rises at higher energies. At low energies the reduction of the condensate is mainly due to baryons, while at higher energies the rise of the 4-volume is due to the abundant mesons produced. Based on our results we expect that moderate beam energies on the order of 10 GeV per nucleon are favourable for studying the restoration of chiral symmetry in a baryon-rich environment in nucleus-nucleus collisions.