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

Abstract

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.