DOI 10.1007/s1005298000915
Quark-hadron phase transition
and strangeness
conservation constraints
Saeed-uddin
Department of Physics, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi-221 005, India
Received: 25 August 1997 / Revised version: 25 March 1998 / Published online: 26 August 1998
Abstract
The implications of the strangeness conservation in a hadronic
resonance gas (HRG) on the expected phase transition to the quark
gluon plasma (QGP) are investigated. It is assumed that under
favourable conditions a first order hadron-quark matter phase
transition may occur in the hot hadronic matter such as those produced
in the ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at CERN and BNL. It is
however shown that the criteria of strict strangeness conservation in
the HRG may not permit the occurrence of a strict first order
equilibrium quark-hadron phase transition unlike a previous study.
This emerges as a consequence of the application of a realistic
equation of state (EOS) for the HRG and QGP phases, which account
for the finite-size effect arising from the short range hard-core
hadronic repulsion in the HRG phase and the perturbative QCD
interactions in the QGP phase. For a first order hadron-quark matter
phase transition to occur one will therefore require large fluctuations
in the critical thermal parameters, which might arise due to
superheating, supercooling or other nonequlibrium effects. We also
discuss a scenario proposed earlier, leading to a possible strangeness
separation process during hadronization.
Copyright Springer-Verlag
