Sudden Hadronization in Relativistic Nuclear Collisions

Abstract

We formulate and study a mechanical instability criterion for sudden hadronization of dense matter fireballs formed in 158A GeV Pb--Pb collisions. Considering properties of quark-gluon matter and hadron gas we obtain the phase boundary between these two phases and demonstrate that the required deep QGP supercooling prior to sudden hadronization has occurred.

Comments: 4 pages incl. 2 figures