Isospin Violation and Possible Signatures of Disoriented Chiral Condensates in Ultrarelativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

It is possible that isospin violating dynamical effects are amplified due to coherence if a disoriented chiral condensate (or other sources of a coherent pion state) is formed in a heavy ion collison. It is shown explicitly that altering the isospin of the coherent state by order of one unit can change the number of ß 0 's in the condensate by some finite fraction of the total number. A possible signature of such amplified isospin violating effects is that the ratio of neutral to charged low p T pions averaged over many events may differ markedly from 1/2. Such a signal would not be washed out if multiple domains of coherent pions form. There has been much recent speculation about the possible formation of regions of coherent or classical pion states in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions [1--10,?,12--22,?,24,27]. The usual context for such discussions is the disoriented chiral condensate (DØC) scenario [4--13,?,15--24,27]. It is generally assumed that the pions emerging from s...