Mapping out the thermodynamic stability of a QCD equation of state with a critical point using active learning

Abstract

The Beam Energy Scan Theory (BEST) collaboration's equation of state (EoS) incorporates a three-dimensional Ising model critical point into the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) equation of state from lattice simulations. However, it contains four free parameters related to the size and location of the critical region in the QCD phase diagram. Certain combinations of the free parameters lead to acausal or unstable realizations of the EoS that should not be considered. In this work, we use an active learning framework to rule out pathological EoS efficiently. We find that checking stability and causality for a small portion of the parameters' range is sufficient to construct algorithms that perform with >96% accuracy across the entire parameter space. Though in this work we focus on a specific case, our approach can be generalized to any EoS containing a parameter space-class correspondence.