Experimental study of the QCD phase diagram in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

Experimental evidences at the relativistic heavy ion collisions (RHIC) and large hadron collider (LHC) have demonstrated the formation of quark gluon plasma (QGP) in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at a small baryon chemical potential, where the phase transition from hadronic matter to QGP is suggested to be a crossover from state-of-the-art lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) calculations. It has been conjectured that there is a first-order phase transition and a critical point at a finite μB region in the QCD phase diagram. This study reviewed recent progress in searching for the QCD critical point from RHIC-STAR experiments.

Keywords

• qcd phase diagram
• relativistic heavy ion collisions
• qcd critical point
• fluctuations of conserved quantites
• light nuclei production