We study the nucleation of a quark gluon plasma (QGP) phase in a hadron gas at low temperatures and high baryon densities. This kind of process will presumably happen very often in nuclear collisions at FAIR and NICA. When the appropriate energy densities (or baryon densities) and temperatures are reached the conversion of one phase into another is not instantaneous. It is a complex process, which involves the nucleation of bubbles of the new phase. One important element of this transition process is the rate of growth of a QGP bubble. In order to estimate it we solve the Relativistic Rayleigh$-$Plesset equation which governs the dynamics of a relativistic spherical bubble in a strongly interacting medium. The baryon rich hadron gas is represented by the nonlinear Walecka model and the QGP is described by the MIT bag model and also by a mean field model of QCD.
We investigate the dynamics of a strong first-order quark-hadron transition driven by cubic interaction via homogeneous bubble nucleation in the Friedberg-Lee model. The one-loop effective thermodynamics potential of the model and the critical bubble profiles have been calculated at different temperatures and chemical potentials. By taking the temperature and the chemical potential as the variables, the evolutions of the surface tension, the typical radius of the critical bubble and the shift in the coarse-grained free energy in the presence of a nucleation bubble are obtained and the limit on…
The nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs) of gluons are known to be difficult to determine with fits of deep inelastic scattering (DIS) and Drell-Yan (DY) data alone. Therefore, the nCTEQ15 analysis of nuclear PDFs added inclusive neutral pion production data from RHIC to help in constraining the gluon. In this analysis, we present a new global analysis of nuclear PDFs based on a much larger set of single inclusive light hadron data from RHIC and the LHC. Using our new nCTEQ code (nCTEQ++) with an optimized version of INCNLO we study systematically the limitations of the theory and the…
We investigate meson and nucleon dynamics at finite baryon density and temperature by coupling the nucleon field and the omega meson to the three-flavor linear sigma model and calculate hadronic properties around the nuclear liquid-gas transition. We apply the functional renormalization group method, and find that mesonic fluctuations increase the strength of the coefficient of the $U_A(1)$ breaking determinant operator as a function of the chiral condensate. As a consequence, we find that the actual value of the anomaly increases discontinuously at the first order nuclear liquid-gas transitio…
Heavy quarks are initially produced in nuclear collisions and the number is conserved during the evolution of the system. We establish a sequential coalescence model with charm conservation and apply it to charmed hadron production at RHIC and LHC energies. The charm conservation enhances the earlier formed hadrons and reduces the later formed ones, which leads to a $D_s/D^0$ enhancement and a $Λ_c/D^0$ suppression. The mass dependence of the sequential hadron formation provides us a new tool for studying the quark-gluon plasma hadronization in high energy nuclear collisions.
After decades-long attempts to measure the mass shift and understand the origin of hadron mass, it became clear that one has to analyze hadrons with small vacuum width. Also, to identify the effect of chiral symmetry breaking, one has to start by looking at chiral partners. In this talk, I will review why such consideration inevitably led us to consider $K^*$ and $K_1$ in nuclear matter [T. Song, T. Hatsuda, S H Lee, PLB792 (2019) 160-169]. With the kaon beam at JPARC, one could observe the mass shift of both particles in a nuclear target experiment. Once the masses and mass difference of $K^*…
Heavy hadron molecules were first theorized from a crude analogy with the deuteron and the nuclear forces binding it, a conjecture which was proven to be on the right track after the discovery of the $X(3872)$. However, this analogy with nuclear physics has not been seriously exploited beyond a few calculations in the two- and three-body sectors, leaving a great number of possible theoretical consequences unexplored. Here we show that nuclear and heavy hadron effective field theories are formally identical: using a suitable notation, there is no formal difference between these two effective fi…
