Equilibration and relaxation times at the chiral phase transition including reheating

Understand

We investigate the relaxational dynamics of the order parameter of chiral symmetry breaking, the sigma mean-field, with a heat bath consisting of quarks and antiquarks.

• A semiclassical stochastic Langevin equation of motion is obtained from the linear sigma model with constituent quarks.
• The equilibration of the system is studied for a first order phase transition and a critical point, where a different behavior is found.
• At the first order phase transition we observe the phase coexistence and at a critical point the phenomenon of critical slowing down with large relaxation times.