Related papers: QCD Critical Point: The Race is On

It is shown that the hadronic matter formed at high temperatures, according to the prescription of the statistical bootstrap principle, develops a critical point at nonzero baryon chemical potential, associated with the end point of a…

The study of quantum phase transitions requires the preparation of a many-body system near its ground state, a challenging task for many experimental systems. The measurement of quench dynamics, on the other hand, is now a routine practice…

The phase diagram of QCD is investigated by varying number of colors $N_c$ within a Polyakov loop quark-meson chiral model. In particular, our attention is focused on the critical point(s): the critical point present for $N_c=3$ moves…

This review describes the current status of precision QCD studies at the LHC. We introduce the main experimental and theoretical methods, discussing also their cross-stimulated developments and recent advances. The different types of QCD…

We discuss that the QCD critical point could appear in central collisions in percolation cluster. We suggest using the nuclear transparency effect and the one of the light nuclear production to identify the critical point.

The presence of a critical point in the QCD phase diagram can deform the trajectories describing the evolution of the expanding fireball in the QCD phase diagram. The deformation of the hydrodynamic trajectories will change the transverse…

We discuss the phase structure of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) with two colors and two flavors of light quarks. This is motivated by the increasing interest in the QCD phase diagram as follows: (1) The QCD critical point search has been…

We review the history of the critical point in the QCD phase diagram, baryon density vs. temperature. In particular we discuss the different theoretical approaches to this problem.

The chiral critical surface is a surface of second order phase transitions bounding the region of first order chiral phase transitions for small quark masses in the {m_{u,d}, m_s,\mu} parameter space. The potential critical endpoint of the…

QCD predicts a phase transition between hadronic matter and a Quark Gluon Plasma at high energy density. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory is a new facility dedicated to the experimental study of…

There is little doubt that Quantumchromodynamics (QCD) is the theory which describes strong interaction physics. Lattice gauge simulations of QCD predict that in the $\mu,T$ plane there is a line where a transition from confined hadronic…

Ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions at the laboratory provide a unique chance to study quantum chromodynamics (QCD) under extreme temperature (${\approx}150\,\mathrm{MeV}$) and density (${\approx}1\,\mathrm{GeV}/\mathrm{fm}^3$)…

In addition to signals for the critical point, evidence for a first order phase transition would indicate a nontrivial structure within the QCD phase diagram. Moreover, while not a direct measurement of the critical point, the presence of a…

We review the recent progress achieved in the theoretical investigation of Quantum Chromodynamics in the high temperature regime, with a focus on results achieved by lattice QCD simulations. The discussion covers the structure of the phase…

We discuss the phase diagram of QCD in the presence of a strong background magnetic field, providing numerical evidence, based on lattice simulations of QCD with $2+1$ flavours and physical quark masses, that the QCD crossover turns into a…

Hot QCD physics studies the nuclear strong force under extreme temperature and densities. Experimentally these conditions are achieved via high-energy collisions of heavy ions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large…

We study the phase structure of lattice QCD with heavy quarks at finite temperature and density by a histogram method. We determine the location of the critical point at which the first-order deconfining transition in the heavy-quark limit…

In QCD with two flavors of massless quarks, the chiral phase transition is plausibly in the same universality class as the classical four component Heisenberg antiferromagnet. Therefore, renormalization group techniques developed in the…

In QCD with two massless quarks, the chiral phase transition is plausibly in the same universality class as the classical O(4) magnet. To test this hypothesis, critical exponents characterizing the behaviour of universal quantities near the…

These lecture notes consist of two major connected parts. The first part (Sections 1, 2), after a brief historical introduction, deals with the physics of critical points in thermodynamic equilibrium. The features of the fluctuations…