1303.6300 (Alex Buchel et al.)

Cavitation effects on the confinement/deconfinement transition    [PDF]

Alex Buchel, Xian O. Camanho, Jose D. Edelstein

Cavitation is a process where the viscous terms in a relativistic fluid result in reducing the effective pressure, thus facilitating the nucleation of bubbles of a stable phase. The effect is particularly pronounced in the vicinity of a (weak) first-order phase transition. We use the holographic correspondence to study cavitation in strongly coupled planar cascading gauge theory plasma close to the confinement phase transition. While in this particular model the shift of the deconfinement temperature due to cavitation does not exceed 5%, we speculate that cavitation might be important near the QCD critical point.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.6300