Revisiting holographic model for thermal and dense QCD with a critical point

A bstract To provide reliable quantitative predictions for hot and dense QCD matter, a holographic model must be calibrated to match first-principles lattice results at vanishing baryon chemical potential. The equation of state from two leading lattice groups, HotQCD and the Wuppertal-Budapest (WB) collaboration, exhibits notable differences at high temperatures. We revisit the Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton (EMD) holographic model for hot QCD with 2+1 flavors and physical quark masses, fitting the lattice QCD data from the WB collaboration. In particular, using the parameterization for the scalar potential and gauge coupling from our previous work [Phys. Rev. D 106 (2022) L121902], we achieve quantitative agreement between the equation of state, chiral condensates, and state-of-the-art lattice results. Furthermore, higher-order baryon number susceptibilities are consistent with those for 2+1+1 flavor QCD. In particular, the critical endpoint (CEP) obtained from the WB collaboration data closely matches that from the combination of HotQCD and WB datasets, highlighting the robustness of the CEP location. Our holographic prediction for the location of the CEP also aligns with recent Bayesian analysis of multiple EMD models and an effective potential approach to QCD from gap equations.