Baryon transport and the QCD critical point

Understand

Fireballs created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions at different beam energies have been argued to follow different trajectories in the QCD phase diagram in which the QCD critical point serves as a landmark.

• Using a (1+1)-dimensional model setting with transverse homogeneity, we study the complexities introduced by the fact that the evolution history of each fireball cannot be characterized by a single trajectory but rather covers an entire swath of the phase diagram, with the finally emitted hadron spectra integrating over contributions from many different trajectories.
• Studying the phase diagram trajectories of fluid cells at different space-time rapidities, we explore how baryon diffusion shuffles them around, and how they are affected by critical dynamics near the QCD critical point.
• We find a striking insensitivity of baryon diffusion to critical effects.