The critical end point of QCD

TL;DR

This paper investigates the critical end point of QCD with two light quark flavors at finite lattice cutoff, finding its position's strong volume dependence and suggesting it is observable in RHIC energy scans.

Contribution

The study provides a lattice QCD determination of the critical end point's location using a Taylor expansion method, highlighting its volume dependence and potential experimental observability.

Findings

Critical end point temperature T^E/T_c ~ 0.95

Critical end point baryon chemical potential mu_B^E/T^E ~ 1.1

Strong volume dependence of the critical end point position

Abstract

We investigate the critical end point of QCD with two flavours of light dynamical quarks at finite lattice cutoff a=1/4T using a Taylor expansion of the baryon number susceptibility. We find a strong volume dependence of the position of the critical end point. In the large volume limit we obtain T^E/T_c \~ 0.95 and mu_B^E/T^E ~ 1.1, where T_c is the cross over temperature at zero chemical potential, and T^E and mu_B^E are the temperature and the baryon chemical potential at the critical end point. The small value of mu_B^E places it in the range of observability in energy scans at the RHIC.