Hydrodynamics with a chiral hadronic equation of state including quark degrees of freedom

We investigate the influence of a deconfinement phase transition on the dynamics of hot and dense nuclear matter. To this aim a hybrid model with an intermediate hydrodynamic stage for the hot and dense phase of the system is employed for collisions of Pb+Pb/Au+Au at beam energies of Elab=2--160 A GeV, while initial and final interactions are performed by a microscopic transport approach (UrQMD). In the hydrodynamic stage an equation of state that incorporates a critical end point in line with lattice data is used. It follows from coupling the Polyakov loop (as an order parameter for deconfinement) to a chiral hadronic SU(3)f model. In this configuration the equation of state describes chiral restoration as well as the deconfinement phase transition. We compare the results from this new equation of state to results obtained, by applying a hadron resonance gas equation of state, focusing on bulk observables deemed to be sensitive to the phase transition to a quark-gluon plasma.