Probing the QCD Critical Point with Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the creation of hot, dense QCD matter near the critical point using relativistic hydrodynamics across various collision energies, highlighting the challenges in isolating critical phenomena due to event-by-event variability.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed event-by-event hydrodynamic analysis across multiple energies to study QCD critical point signatures in heavy-ion collisions.

Findings

Event-by-event fluctuations cover a wide range of temperatures and chemical potentials.

Dynamical responses to the critical point are obscured by background variability.

Identifies challenges in detecting critical phenomena in experimental data.

Abstract

We utilize an event-by-event relativistic hydrodynamic calculation performed at a number of different incident beam energies to investigate the creation of hot and dense QCD matter near the critical point. Using state-of-the-art analysis and visualization tools we demonstrate that each collision event probes QCD matter characterized by a wide range of temperatures and baryo-chemical potentials, making a dynamical response of the system to the vicinity of the critical point very difficult to isolate above the background.