Dilepton emission assists the search for the QCD critical point

Abstract

In this work, we propose that dilepton emission rate (DER) could possibly carry the characteristic structures associated with the chiral criticality of the QCD system based on the extended Polyakov-quark-meson model. The model could successfully capture two main mechanisms for dilepton production, $π^+π^-$ and quark-antiquark annihilations on one hand, and self-consistently account for chiral transition and (de-)confinement on the other hand. All the moments of the DER peak exhibit extremal features similar to those of light-quark mass along the chemical freeze-out lines, thus the DER can reflect the change of chiral symmetry and criticality. However, the DER is relatively too low to produce a sufficient number of thermal dileptons in each heavy-ion collision, which prevents the implementation of event-by-event measurements of the moments. As an alternative, we propose to study the baseline-subtracted DER: For a given low center of mass of dileptons, the reduced baseline-subtracted DER exhibits a nonmonotonic behavior in the region where the light-quark mass changes most rapidly.