Shock discontinuities around the confinement-deconfinement transition in baryon-rich dense matter

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Abstract
We investigate shock discontinuities that involve a conversion of hadronic matter into quarkgluon matter and vice versa. Such discontinuities may develop when nuclear matter is compressed to energy densities beyond the deconfinement transition and in the hadronization of an expanding quark-gluon plasma. In these investigations we study the influence of various phenomenological equations of state. Consequences for entropy production in heavy-ion collisions are discussed and estimates of inclusive particle ratios at freezeout are given. We find that antiparticle-to-particle ratios may be enhanced by an order of magnitude if a quark-gluon plasma is created during the collision compared to a purely hadronic collision scenario.