Suppression of baryon diffusion and transport in a baryon rich strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma

TL;DR

This paper uses holographic models to predict baryon transport properties in a strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma, showing suppression of diffusion near the QCD critical point and matching lattice results for susceptibilities.

Contribution

It introduces holographic black hole solutions to compute baryon transport coefficients across a range of temperatures and densities, providing new insights into QGP behavior.

Findings

Baryon diffusion is suppressed in the studied temperature and density range.

Calculated baryon susceptibility agrees with recent lattice QCD results.

Transport coefficients can be integrated into hydrodynamic simulations for heavy-ion collisions.

Abstract

Five dimensional black hole solutions that describe the QCD crossover transition seen in $(2+1)$-flavor lattice QCD calculations at zero and nonzero baryon densities are used to obtain predictions for the baryon susceptibility, baryon conductivity, baryon diffusion constant, and thermal conductivity of the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma in the range of temperatures $130\,\textrm{MeV}\le T\le 300\,\textrm{MeV}$ and baryon chemical potentials $0\le \mu_B \le 400\,\textrm{MeV}$. Diffusive transport is predicted to be suppressed in this region of the QCD phase diagram, which is consistent with the existence of a critical end point at larger baryon densities. We also calculate the fourth-order baryon susceptibility at zero baryon chemical potential and find quantitative agreement with recent lattice results. The baryon transport coefficients computed in this paper can be readily implemented in state-of-the-art hydrodynamic codes used to investigate the dense QGP currently produced at RHIC's low energy beam scan.