POSSIBILITY OF SPONTANEOUS PARITY VIOLATION IN HOT QCD

We argue that for QCD in the limit of a large number of colors, the ax ial U(1) symmetry of massless quarks is effectively restored at the de confining phase transition. If this transition is of second order, met astable states in which parity is spontaneously broken can appear in t he hadronic phase. These metastable states have dramatic signatures, i ncluding enhanced production of eta and eta' mesons, which can decay t hrough parity violating decay processes such as eta --> pi(0)pi(0), an d global parity odd asymmetries for charged pions.