Indications for a critical point in the phase diagram for hot and dense nuclear matter

Two-pion interferometry measurements are studied for a broad range of collision centralities in Au+Au (s_NN=7.7–200 GeV) and Pb+Pb (s_NN=2.76 TeV) collisions. They indicate non-monotonic excitation functions for the Gaussian emission source radii difference (R_out−R_side), suggestive of reaction trajectories which spend a fair amount of time near a soft point in the equation of state (EOS) that coincides with the critical end point (CEP). A Finite-Size Scaling (FSS) analysis of these excitation functions, provides further validation tests for the CEP. It also indicates a second order phase transition at the CEP, and the values T^cep∼165 MeV and μ_B ^cep∼95 MeV for its location in the (T,μ_B)-plane of the phase diagram. The static critical exponents (ν≈0.66 and γ≈1.2) extracted via the same FSS analysis, place this CEP in the 3D Ising model (static) universality class. A Dynamic Finite-Size Scaling analysis of the excitation functions, gives the estimate z∼0.87 for the dynamic critical exponent, suggesting that the associated critical expansion dynamics is dominated by the hydrodynamic sound mode.