Quark-hadron phase transition with surface fluctuations

The effect of surface fluctuations on the observables of a quark-hadron phase transition is studied. The Ginzburg-Landau formalism is extended by the inclusion of an extra term in the free energy that depends on the vertical displacements from a flat surface. The probability that a bin has a particular net displacement is determined by lattice simulation, where the physics input is color confinement. The surface fluctuations from bin to bin are related to multiplicity fluctuations, which in turn are measured by the factorial moments. It is found that both the F-scaling behavior and the scaling exponent are essentially unaffected by the inclusion of surface fluctuations. copyright 1996 The American Physical Society