Critical lensing and kurtosis near a critical point in the QCD phase diagram in and out of equilibrium

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

In this work, we study the lensing effect of the QCD critical point on hydrodynamic trajectories and its consequences on the net-proton kurtosis κ₄. Including critical behavior by means of the BEST Collaboration equation of state (EoS), we first consider a scenario in equilibrium, then compare with hydrodynamic 0+1D simulations with Bjorken expansion, including both shear and bulk viscous terms. We find that, both in and out of equilibrium, the size and shape of the critical region directly affect if the signal will survive through the dynamical evolution.