Critical end point and its consequences Original Research Article

Recently a lot of evidence that there exists a critical end point (CEP) in the QCD phase diagram has been accumulating. However, so far, no reliable equation of state with the CEP has been employed in hydrodynamical calculations. In this article, we construct the equations of state with the CEP on the basis of the universality hypothesis and show that the CEP acts as an attractor of isentropic trajectories. We also consider the time evolution in the case with the CEP and discuss how the CEP affects the final state observables.