Thermodynamic instabilities in high energy heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

One of the very interesting aspects of high energy heavy-ion collisions experiments is a detailed study of the thermodynamical properties of strongly interacting nuclear matter away from the nuclear ground state. In this direction, many efforts were focused on searching for possible phase transitions in such collisions. We investigate thermodynamic instabilities in a hot and dense nuclear medium where a phase transition from nucleonic matter to resonance-dominated [Formula: see text]-matter can take place. Such a phase transition can be characterized by both mechanical instability (fluctuations on the baryon density) and by chemical-diffusive instability (fluctuations on the strangeness concentration) in asymmetric nuclear matter. In analogy with the liquid–gas nuclear phase transition, hadronic phases with different values of antibaryon–baryon ratios and strangeness content may coexist. Such a physical regime could be, in principle, investigated in the future high-energy compressed nuclear matter experiments which will make it possible to create compressed baryonic matter with a high net baryon density.