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Existence of a second phase transition in A−A collisions at energies available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider: A physical interpretation

C. Pajares1, R. P. Scharenberg2, and B. K. Srivastava2,*

  • *Contact author: brijesh@purdue.edu
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Phys. Rev. C 114, 044901 – Published 5 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/c9q1-rmcm

Abstract

The observed fluid behavior of the matter produced in heavy ion and pp collisions implies that the strings stretched between the constituents of the projectile and target should have a hard core giving rise to a repulsion between them. It is shown that in these collisions there are two critical string densities, one corresponding to the well-studied percolation of strings and another to the percolation of the hard core of the strings. These two critical densities are related to two critical temperatures, one T≈160 MeV would correspond to the restoration of chiral symmetry and partial deconfinement and a second transition T≈220 MeV form the fluid behavior of quantum chromodynamics matter strongly interacting to a quasi free gas of quarks and gluons. This argument is supported by the recently published results on the sudden increase in the degrees of freedom above the deconfinement temperature in pp and A−A collisions [Mishra et al., Nucl. Phys. A 1046, 122865 (2024)].

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Phys. Rev. C 114, 044901– Published 5 October, 2026
  • Received 5 June 2026
  • Accepted 11 September 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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