Disoriented chiral condensate: Theory and experiment

It is thought that a region of pseudo-vacuum, where the chiral order parameter is misaligned from its vacuum orientation in isospin space, might occasionally form in high-energy hadronic or nuclear collisions. The possible detection of such disoriented chiral condensate (DCC) would provide useful information about the chiral structure of the QCD vacuum and/or the chiral phase transition of strong interactions at high temperature. We review the theoretical developments concerning the possible DCC formation in high-energy collisions as well as the various experimental searches that have been performed so far. We discuss future prospects for upcoming DCC searches e.g. in high-energy heavy-ion collision experiments at RHIC and LHC.