  One of the main aims of present and upcoming high energy heavy ion collision
experiments is to study new phases of matter at extreme temperature and
density. It is expected that a nontrivial classical pion field configuration
can occasionally form during the out-of-equilibrium chiral phase transition. We
have recently shown that, contrarily to what has been assumed so far, this
configuration is not identical to the so-called disoriented chiral condensate
(DCC), proposed in the early 1990's. A detailed analysis reveals that a more
realistic picture is that of an ``unpolarized'' DCC, where the Fourier modes of
the field have completely independent orientations in isospin space instead of
being aligned with each other as in the original DCC. This has important
implications concerning the possible detection of the phenomenon. In
particular, the main expected signature of the original DCC, which is used in
most experimental searches, is absent in the unpolarized case. We point out
that the fact that no evidence of DCC formation has been reported so far in
nuclear collisions actually agrees with our present theoretical understanding.
New experimental strategies should be designed to look for the unpolarized DCC
in existing data from SPS as well as in future searches at RHIC and LHC.
