Probing chiral dynamics by charged-pion correlations

The environment generated in the mid-rapidity region of a high-energy nuclear collision endows the pionic degrees of freedom with a time-dependent effective mass. Its specific evolution provides a mechanism for the production of back-to-back charge-conjugate pairs of soft pions which may present an observable signal of the non-equilibrium dynamics of the chiral order parameter.Comment: revtex body and 3 eps figures (4 pages total

Signals of spinodal phase decomposition in high-energy nuclear collisions

High-energy nuclear collisions produce quark-gluon plasmas that expand and hadronize. If the associated phase transition is of first order then the hadronization should proceed through a spinodal phase separation. We explore here the possibility of identifying the associated clumping by analysis of suitable N-particle momentum correlations.Comment: 7 pages, incl 4 ps figure

Quantum Field Treatment of DCC Dynamics

A practical quantum-field treatment is developed for systems endowed with an effective mass function depending on both space and time and a schematic application illustrates the quantitative importance of quantum fluctuations in the dynamics of disoriented chiral condensates.Comment: revtex body and 4 eps figures (4 pages total

Brownian shape motion on five-dimensional potential-energy surfaces: Nuclear fission-fragment mass distributions

Although nuclear fission can be understood qualitatively as an evolution of the nuclear shape, a quantitative description has proven to be very elusive. In particular, until now, there exists no model with demonstrated predictive power for the fission fragment mass yields. Exploiting the expected strongly damped character of nuclear dynamics, we treat the nuclear shape evolution in analogy with Brownian motion and perform random walks on five-dimensional fission potential-energy surfaces which were calculated previously and are the most comprehensive available. Test applications give good reproduction of highly variable experimental mass yields. This novel general approach requires only a single new global parameter, namely the critical neck size at which the mass split is frozen in, and the results are remarkably insensitive to its specific value.Comment: 4 pages, 2 ps figure