What It Takes to Discover the QCD Critical Point - || Dr. Maneesha Pradeep ||

Speaker : Dr. Maneesha Pradeep

University of Maryland, U.S.A.


Title : What It Takes to Discover the QCD Critical Point

Abstract:-
The strong nuclear force, described by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), plays a central role in shaping the visible universe—from binding protons and neutrons inside atomic nuclei to governing the behavior of matter under extreme conditions. Understanding the thermodynamics of QCD is essential not only for describing the early universe but also for exploring the nature of dense matter in neutron stars and heavy-ion collisions. In this talk, I will focus on a particularly intriguing possibility: a phase transition in QCD from a gas of hadrons—color-neutral combinations of quarks and gluons—to a deconfined quark-gluon plasma. A critical point on the QCD phase diagram will separate smooth crossover from first-order transition, serving as a landmark in the QCD phase diagram.

Heavy-ion collisions recreate the extreme conditions necessary to probe this phase diagram. Near a critical point, one expects a universal enhancement of thermodynamic fluctuations, which could manifest as non-monotonic variations in observed particle multiplicities as a function of collision energy. I will discuss how such signatures are sought in experiments, the theoretical challenges involved in interpreting them, and why discovering the QCD critical point is far more subtle than locating the critical points in ordinary liquid-gas phase-transitions. As I shall describe, the QCD critical point search sits squarely at the intersection of theoretical and experimental frontiers.