POSSIBILITY OF FORMING A LARGE DCC IN ULTRA-RELATIVISTIC HEAVY-ION COLLISIONS

Abstract

We demonstrate the possibility of forming a single, large domain of disoriented chiral condensate (DCC) in a heavy-ion collision. In our scenario, rapid initial heating of the parton system provides a driving force for the chiral field, moving it away from the true vacuum and forcing it to go to the opposite point on the vacuum manifold. This converts the entire hot region into a single DCC domain. Subsequent rolling down of the chiral field to its true vacuum will then lead to emission of a large number of (approximately) coherent pions. The requirement of suppression of thermal fluctuations to maintain the (approximate) coherence of such a large DCC domain, favors three-dimensional expansion of the plasma over the longitudinal expansion even at very early stages of evolution. This also constrains the maximum temperature of the system to lie within a window. We roughly estimate this window to be about 200–400 MeV. These results lead us to predict that extremely high energy collisions of very small nuclei (possibly hadrons) are better suited for observing signatures of a large DCC. Another possibility is to focus on peripheral collisions of heavy nuclei.