Cavitation effects on the confinement/deconfinement transition

Understand

Cavitation is a process where the viscous terms in a relativistic fluid result in reducing the effective pressure, thus facilitating the nucleation of bubbles of a stable phase.

• The effect is particularly pronounced in the vicinity of a (weak) first-order phase transition.
• We use the holographic correspondence to study cavitation in a strongly coupled planar cascading gauge theory plasma close to the confinement/deconfinement phase transition.
• While in this particular model the shift of the deconfinement temperature due to cavitation does not exceed 5%, we speculate that cavitation might be important near the QCD critical point.