Bootstraping the QCD critical point

It is shown that hadronic matter formed at high temperatures, according to the prescription of the statistical bootstrap principle, develops a critical point at nonzero baryon chemical potential. The location of the critical point in the phase diagram, however, depends on the detailed knowledge of the partition function of the deconfined phase, near the critical line. In a simplified version of the quark-gluon partition function, the resulting location of the critical point is compared with the solutions of other approaches and in particular with the results of lattice QCD. The proximity of our solution to the freeze-out area in heavy-ion experiments is also discussed. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.