Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Nonperturbative Effects In A Rapidly Expanding Quark Gluon Plasma, A. K. Mohanty, P. Shukla, Marcelo Gleiser

Dartmouth Scholarship

Within first-order phase transitions, we investigate pretransitional effects due to the nonperturbative, large-amplitude thermal fluctuations which can promote phase mixing before the critical temperature is reached from above. In contrast with the cosmological quark-hadron transition, we find that the rapid cooling typical of the relativistic heavy ion collider and large hadron collider experiments and the fact that the quark-gluon plasma is chemically unsaturated suppress the role of nonperturbative effects at current collider energies. Significant supercooling is possible in a (nearly) homogeneous state of quark gluon plasma.