Hosted by: Hiroshi Oki

We exploit the universality between the QCD critical point and the three dimensional Ising model to derive closed form expressions for non-equilibrium critical cumulants on the crossover side of the critical point. Novel expressions are obtained for the non-Gaussian Skewness and Kurtosis cumulants; our results reveal that they can differ both in magnitude and sign from equilibrium expectations. We show further that key elements of the Kibble-Zurek framework of non-equilibrium phase transitions can be employed to describe the dynamics of these critical cumulants. As a consequence, observables sensitive to critical dynamics in heavy-ion collisions are expressible as universal scaling functions and thereby provide powerful model independent guidance in searches for the QCD critical point.