English

Signatures of the Tricritical Point in QCD

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2009-10-31 v2 Nuclear Theory

Abstract

Several approaches to QCD with two massless quarks at finite temperature T and baryon chemical potential mu suggest the existence of a tricritical point on the boundary of the phase with spontaneously broken chiral symmetry. In QCD with massive quarks there is then a critical point at the end of a first order transition line. We discuss possible experimental signatures of this point, which provide information about its location and properties. We propose a combination of event-by-event observables, including suppressed fluctuations in T and mu and, simultaneously, enhanced fluctuations in the multiplicity of soft pions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-ph/9806219,
  title  = {Signatures of the Tricritical Point in QCD},
  author = {M. Stephanov and K. Rajagopal and E. Shuryak},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/9806219},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

5 pages (published version)