Searching for the QCD critical point with relativistic viscous hydrodynamics

Abstract

With the STAR's Beam Energy Scan II, a rich amount of data exists to search for the QCD critical point. However, a central challenge is that the critical point cannot be directly extracted from data but rather is probed dynamically in an expanding, cooling system that may be far-from-equilibrium. In this talk, we show the latest results from equations of state with a movable critical point generated by the MUSES collaboration, run in the 3+1D relativistic viscous hydrodynamics code CCAKE. We discuss numerical improvements to CCAKE that include ``glass'' initial conditions and adaptive smoothed particle hydrodynamics, allowing us to rapidly and accurately obtain numerical solutions to the hydrodynamic equations of motion. We can quantify the interplay between beam energy, location of the critical point, and rapidity range.