The scenario of homogeneous nucleation is investigated for a first-order quark-hadron phase transition in a rapidly expanding background of quark gluon plasma. It is found that significant supercooling is possible before hadronization begins. This study also suggests that spinodal decomposition competes with nucleation and may provide an alternative mechanism for phase conversion.

We have initiated a search for a new type of nuclear matter, theη-mesic nucleus, using beams from the multi-GeV hadron facility, COSY at Juelich, Germany. A large acceptance scintillator detector, ENSTAR has been designed and built at BARC, Mumbai and fully assembled and tested at COSY. A test run for calibration and evaluation has been completed. In this contribution we present the design and technical details of the ENSTAR detector and how it will be used to detect protons and pions (the decay products ofη-mesic bound state). The detector is made of plastic scintillators arranged in three concentric cylindrical layers. The readout of the detectors is by means of optical fibres. The layers are used to generate ΔE –E spectra for particle identification and total energy information of stopped particles. The granularity of the detector allows for position (θ and ϕø determination making the event reconstruction kinematically complete