The QCD Tricritical Point: Beyond Monotony in Heavy Ion Physics

Abstract

I first sketch recent developments concerning the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter as a function of temperature and baryon density, obtained using a model for two-flavor QCD in which the interaction between quarks is modelled on that induced by instantons. The phase diagram has a chiral symmetry breaking vacuum, a color superconductor phase at high density, and a mixed phase in between which can describe nuclear matter if the high density regions in the mixed phase form droplets. This is amusingly similar to the phase diagram of the copper oxide superconductors, although their critical temperatures are smaller by a factor of about 10^{-9} and their mixed phase seems to form stripes, rather than droplets. This and other approaches to QCD with two massless quarks suggests the existence of a tricritical point on the boundary of the phase with spontaneously broken chiral symmetry. In QCD with massive quarks there is then a critical point at the end of a first order transition line. We discuss possible experimental signatures of this point, which provide information about its location and properties. We propose a combination of event-by-event observables, including suppressed fluctuations in T and mu and, simultaneously, enhanced fluctuations in the multiplicity of soft pions. As a control parameter (like the collision energy) is varied, the fluctuations of appropriate event-by-event observables should therefore have minima or maxima. Experimental detection of these non-monotonic signatures would confirm that the matter was initially above the chiral phase transition, increasing our confidence in the interpretation of monotonic changes in other observables, and would teach us much about the QCD phase diagram.