Critical point in the phase diagram of primordial quark-gluon matter from black hole physics

Abstract

Strongly interacting matter undergoes a crossover phase transition at high temperatures $T\sim 10^{12}$ K and zero net-baryon density. A fundamental question in the theory of strong interactions, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), is whether a hot and dense system of quarks and gluons displays critical phenomena when doped with more quarks than antiquarks, where net-baryon number fluctuations diverge. Recent lattice QCD work indicates that such a critical point can only occur in the baryon dense regime of the theory, which defies a description from first principles calculations. Here we use the holographic gauge/gravity correspondence to map the fluctuations of baryon charge in the dense quark-gluon liquid onto a numerically tractable gravitational problem involving the charge fluctuations of holographic black holes. This approach quantitatively reproduces ab initio results for the lowest order moments of the baryon fluctuations and makes predictions for the higher order baryon susceptibilities and also for the location of the critical point, which is found to be within the reach of heavy ion collision experiments.

23 pages, 16 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review D (v3: updated information on affiliations and grants)

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• QCD Equation of State at Finite Chemical Potentials for Relativistic Nuclear Collisions
• Search for the QCD Critical Point in High Energy Nuclear Collisions
• Criticality in a Hadron Resonance Gas model with the van der Waals interaction
• Critical lensing and kurtosis near a critical point in the QCD phase diagram in and out-of-equilibrium
• QCD Phase Boundary and the Hadrochemical Horizon
• Constraining the hadronic spectrum and repulsive interactions in a hadron resonance gas via fluctuations of conserved charges
• Jet Quenching in The Most Vortical Fluid: A Holographic Approach
• Smooth matching of $\hat{q}$ from hadronic to quark and gluon degrees of freedom
• Holographic Technicolor Model and Dark Matter
• Extracting the strangeness freeze-out temperature from net-Kaon data at RHIC