Disoriented Chiral Condensate: Theory and Experiment

Abstract

It is thought that a region of pseudo-vacuum, where the chiral order parameter is misaligned from its vacuum orientation in isospin space, might occasionally form in high energy hadronic or nuclear collisions. The possible detection of such disoriented chiral condensate (DCC) would provide useful information about the chiral structure of the QCD vacuum and/or the chiral phase transition of strong interactions at high temperature. We review the theoretical developments concerning the possible DCC formation in high-energy collisions as well as the various experimental searches that have been performed so far. We discuss future prospects for upcoming DCC searches, e.g. in high-energy heavy-ion collision experiments at RHIC and LHC.Comment: 120 pages, 52 figures. Uses elsart.cls. To appear in Physics Reports. Minor corrections, references adde