Speaker
Description
The Beam Energy Scan program at RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider)
is searching for the QCD critical point or a first order phase transition. The main signal for the
critical point is the kurtosis of the distribution of proton yields obtained on an event by
event basis where one expects a peak at the critical point. However, its exact behavior is
still an open question due to out-of-equilibrium effects and the current limitations of the equation of state at large densities. Here we
use a simplistic hydrodynamic model that enforces strangeness-neutrality, selecting on
trajectories that pass close to the critical point. We vary the initial conditions (in terms of how far-from-equilibrium they begin)
in order to estimate the effect of out-of-equilibrium hydrodynamics on the kurtosis signal.
