Speaker
Description
We study the first-order chiral phase transition dynamics in a supercooled expanding quark–gluon plasma (QGP). Using the BEST equation of state incorporating a QCD critical point and constrained by lattice QCD data, we investigate how thermally nucleated hadronic bubbles grow and convert the surrounding QGP into hadronic matter during Bjorken expansion. We identify three characteristic time scales governing the phase-conversion dynamics: the onset of nucleation, rapid hadronic conversion, and completion of the transition. We find that the phase conversion generates a nontrivial distribution of thermodynamic states in the hadronic matter beyond smooth hydrodynamic evolution, which may leave observable imprints on final-state particle distributions in heavy-ion collisions.