Title: Lattice QCD and the Beam Energy Scan program at RHIC

Speaker: Dr. Prasad Hegde

Abstract: The Beam Energy Scan program at RHIC was designed to look for the QCD critical point that is conjectured to lie in the T-muB plane of the QCD phase diagram. Unfortunately, both its existence and location are unknown owing to our inability to solve QCD in this regime. Lattice QCD, which is a numerical first-principles approach to QCD, breaks down when the quarks are coupled to a baryon chemical potential muB. This is the infamous sign problem. Although an exact solution is not known, there are several approximate techniques that have yielded some insight about this region. In this talk, we will describe our recent results obtained using the method of Taylor expansions, which is a way to deduce properties about the muB>0 region from simulations at muB=0. We will describe our results for the equation of state and end with some tentative lower bounds on the possible location of the critical point.