Phase transitions in an expanding medium -- hot remnants

TL;DR

This paper investigates the behavior of hot plasma remnants during a first order confinement/deconfinement phase transition in an expanding medium, revealing their robustness across different expansion scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces an effective boundary model fitted to the holographic Witten model to analyze hot remnants in expanding media, a novel approach in this context.

Findings

Hot plasma remnants do not cool or nucleate bubbles despite expansion.

Remnants' dynamics are robust across different expansion scenarios.

Remnants eventually dissolve and reheat, showing complex behavior.

Abstract

We analyze the dynamics of a first order confinement/deconfinement phase transition in an expanding medium using an effective boundary description fitted to the holographic Witten model. We observe and analyze hot plasma remnants, which do not cool down or nucleate bubbles despite the expansion of the system. The appearance of the hot remnants, the dynamics of their shrinking and subsequent dissolution and further heating up is very robust and persists in such diverse scenarios as boost-invariant expansion with a flat Minkowski metric and cosmological expansion in a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker spacetime.