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

Understand

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.