Er / 40682 - 59 1 - 19 - 94 Can Disordered Chiral Condensates Form ? a Dynamical Perspective

We address the issue of whether a region of disordered chiral condensate (DCC), in which the chiral condensate has components along the pion directions, can form. We consider a system going through the chiral phase transition either via a quench, or via relaxation of the high temperature phase to the low temperature one within a given time scale (of order ∼ 1fm/c). We use a density matrix based formalism that takes both thermal and quantum fluctuations into account non-perturbatively to argue that if the O(4) linear sigma model is the correct way to model the situation in QCD, then it is very unlikely at least in the Hartree approximation, that a large (> 10 fm) DCC region will form. Typical sizes of such regions are ∼ 1 − 2 fm and the density of pions in such regions is at most of order ∼ 0.2/fm 3. We end with some speculations on how large DCC regions may be formed.