  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.
