Pion breather states in QCD

We describe a class of pionic breather solutions (PBS) which appear in the chiral Lagrangian description of low-energy QCD. These configurations are long lived, with lifetimes greater than 103 fm/c, and could arise as remnants of disoriented chiral condensate (DCC) formation at RHIC. We show that the chiral Lagrangian equations of motion for a uniformly isospin-polarized domain reduce to those of the sine-Gordon model. Consequently, our solutions are directly related to the breather solutions of sine-Gordon theory in 3+1 dimensions. We investigate the possibility of PBS formation from multiple domains of DCC, and show that the probability of formation is non-negligible. copyright 1999 The American Physical Society