Modeling the diffusive dynamics of critical fluctuations near the QCD critical point

Understand

The experimental search for the QCD critical point by means of relativistic heavy-ion collisions necessitates the development of dynamical models of fluctuations.

• In this work we study the fluctuations of the net-baryon density near the critical point.
• Due to net-baryon number conservation the correct dynamics is given by the fluid dynamical diffusion equation, which we extend by a white noise stochastic term to include intrinsic fluctuations.
• We quantify finite resolution and finite size effects by comparing our numerical results to analytic expectations for the structure factor and the equal-time correlation function.