Far-from-equilibrium search for the QCD critical point

Understand

Initial conditions for relativistic heavy-ion collisions may be far from equilibrium (i.e.

• there are large initial contributions from the shear stress tensor and bulk pressure) but it is expected that on very short time scales the dynamics converge to a universal attractor that defines hydrodynamic behavior.
• Thus far, studies of this nature have only considered an idealized situation at LHC energies (high temperatures $T$ and vanishing baryon chemical potential $\mu_B=0$) but, in this work, we investigate for the first time how far-from-equilibrium effects may influence experimentally driven searches for the Quantum Chromodynamic critical point at RHIC.
• We find that the path to the critical point is heavily influenced by far from equilibrium initial conditions where viscous effects lead to dramatically different $\left\{T,\mu_B\right\}$ trajectories through the QCD phase diagram.