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  • Open Access

Phase Transitions in an Expanding Medium: Hot Remnants

Romuald A. Janik1,*, Matti Järvinen2,3,†, and Jacob Sonnenschein4,‡

  • *Contact author: romuald.janik@gmail.com
  • †Contact author: matti.jarvinen@apctp.org
  • ‡Contact author: cobi@tauex.tau.ac.il
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Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 041601 – Published 21 July, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/wphs-1kfd

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.

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Outline

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Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 041601– Published 21 July, 2025
  • Received 17 March 2025
  • Accepted 30 June 2025
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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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