The impact of dissipation and noise on fluctuations in chiral fluid dynamics
Abstract
We investigate the nonequilibrium evolution of the sigma field coupled to a fluid dynamic expansion of a hot fireball to model the chiral phase transition in heavy-ion collisions. The dissipative processes and fluctuations are allowed under the assumption that the total energy of the coupled system is conserved. We use the linear sigma model with constituent quarks to investigate the effects of the chiral phase transition on the equilibration and excitation of the sigma modes. The quark fluid acts as a heat bath in local thermal equilibrium and the sigma field evolves according to a semiclassical stochastic Langevin equation of motion. The effects of supercooling and reheating of the fluid in a first order phase transition are observed via the delayed relaxation of the sigma field to a new equilibrium state. At the first order phase transition the nonequilibrium fluctuations are strongly enhanced.