Disoriented chiral condensates

Disoriented chiral condensates are conjectured to occur in very high multiplicity hadronic collisions as a result of a brief, localized restoration of chiral symmetry. Such collisions produce fireballs which expand radially, and which may persist to a relatively large hadronization radius. As the fireball expands, the interior may cool rapidly, relaxing into a state in which the orientation of the chiral condensate in its internal symmetry space is disoriented. After the debris shell hadronizes, the disoriented condensate is expected to relax to the normal vacuum by the coherent radiation of pions. This radiation has distinctive momentum and isospin distributions, and may provide an explanation of Centauro and related phenomena in cosmic-ray events. This distributions also point to strategies for detecting such phenomena at high energy hadron colliders