@article{1b9e10ff39454bc483eec6a9ac301c7f,
title = "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∼1012 K and zero net-baryon density. A fundamental question in the theory of strong interactions, 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.",
author = "Renato Critelli and Jorge Noronha and Jacquelyn Noronha-Hostler and Israel Portillo and Claudia Ratti and Romulo Rougemont",
note = "Funding Information: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. PHY-1654219 and OAC-1531814 and by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, within the framework of the Beam Energy Scan Theory (BEST) Topical Collaboration. Funding Information: We thank R. Bellwied, P. Parotto, and K. Meehan for helpful comments and S. Sharma for providing the tables that contain the publicly available results of Ref. . J. N., R. R., and R. C. thank S. Finazzo for insightful discussions on the gauge/gravity duality at nonzero baryon density. J. N. thanks the Funda{\c c}{\~a}o de Amparo {\`a} Pesquisa do Estado de S{\~a}o Paulo (FAPESP) and Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cient{\'i}fico e Tecnol{\'o}gico (CNPq) for support. R. C. was supported by FAPESP Grant No. 2016/09263-2. R. R. acknowledges financial support by Funda{\c c}{\~a}o Norte Riograndense de Pesquisa e Cultura (FUNPEC). This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. PHY-1654219 and OAC-1531814 and by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, within the framework of the Beam Energy Scan Theory (BEST) Topical Collaboration. The authors gratefully acknowledge the use of the Maxwell Cluster and the advanced support from the Center of Advanced Computing and Data Systems at the University of Houston. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2017 American Physical Society.",
year = "2017",
month = nov,
day = "28",
doi = "10.1103/PhysRevD.96.096026",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "96",
journal = "Physical Review D",
issn = "2470-0010",
publisher = "American Physical Society",
number = "9",
}