https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202531603001
Disoriented isospin condensates in heavy-ion collisions
1 School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
2 Department of Physics and Astronomy and Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA
3 Department of Physics and Astronomy, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37240, USA
* e-mail: kapusta@umn.edu
** e-mail: prattsc@msu.edu
*** e-mail: mayank.singh@vanderbilt.edu
Published online: 27 January 2025
Anomalous neutral to charged kaon correlations measured by the ALICE collaboration have defied usual explanations. We propose that the large fluctuations could arise because of a disoriented isospin condensate where there is an imbalance between up and down condensates at the time kaons hadronize. This could happen in heavy-ion collisions when the quark condensate re-forms as the system cools and the approximate chiral symmetry of QCD is broken. Within the linear sigma model, we show that the energy cost of forming a disoriented isospin condensate is small making it very plausible.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2025
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