Seminar in Hadronic Physics

The QCD critical point in heavy ion collisions

Chiho Nonaka

University of Nagoya

Hydrodynamical calculations have been successful in describing global observables in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions, which aim to observe the production of the quark-gluon plasma. On the other hand, recently, a lot of evidence that there exists a QCD critical point in the QCD phase diagram has been accumulating. Nevertheless, so far, no equation of state with the QCD critical point has been employed in hydrodynamical calculations. In this paper, we construct the equation of state with the QCD critical point on the basis of the universality hypothesis and show that the QCD critical point acts as an attractor of isentropic trajectories. We also consider the time evolution in the case with the QCD critical point and discuss how the QCD critical point affects the final state observables, such as the correlation length, fluctuation, viscosity, chemical freezeout, kinetic freezeout, and so on.