QCD phase boundary and critical point in a bag model calculation

Abstract

Location of critical point and mapping the QCD phase boundary still exists as one of the most interesting and studied problems of heavy-ion physics. A new equation of state (EOS) for a gas of extended baryons and pointlike mesons is presented here which accounts for the repulsive hard-core interactions arising due to the geometrical size of the baryons. A first-order deconfining phase transition is obtained using Gibbs' equilibrium criteria and a bag model EOS for the weakly interacting quark matter. It is interesting to find that the phase transition line ends at a critical point beyond which a crossover region exists between hot-dense meson gas and quark-antiquark gluon matter. Our curve closely resembles in shape the predictions of the available lattice gauge calculations and also reproduces the conjectured phase boundary.