Eur. Phys. J. A (2016) 52: 236
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2016-16236-5

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Observables of non-equilibrium phase transition^⋆

¹ FPV, Univerzita Mateja Bela, Tajovského 40, 97401, Banská Bystrica, Slovakia
² FJFI, České vysoké učení technické v Praze, Břehová 7, 11519, Prague 1, Czech Republic
³ Elektrotechnická fakulta, Žilinská univerzita, Akademická 1, 01026, Žilina, Slovakia

^* e-mail: boris.tomasik@cern.ch

Received: 30 October 2015
Accepted: 17 January 2016
Published online: 19 August 2016

Abstract

A rapidly expanding fireball which undergoes first-order phase transition will supercool and proceed via spinodal decomposition. Hadrons are produced from the individual fragments as well as the left-over matter filling the space between them. Emission from fragments should be visible in rapidity correlations, particularly of protons. In addition to that, even within narrow centrality classes, rapidity distributions will be fluctuating from one event to another in case of fragmentation. This can be identified with the help of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Finally, we present a method which allows to sort events with varying rapidity distributions, in such a way that events with similar rapidity histograms are grouped together.