We study the quark number susceptibility in holographic QCD with a finite
chemical potential or under an external magnetic field at finite temperature.
We first consider the quark number susceptibility with the chemical potential.
We observe that approaching the critical temperature from high temperature
regime, the quark number susceptibility divided by temperature square develops
a peak as we increase the chemical potential, which confirms recent lattice QCD
results. We discuss this behavior in connection with the existence of the
critical end point in the QCD phase diagram. We also consider the quark number
susceptibility under the external magnetic field. We predict that the quark
number susceptibility exhibits a blow-up behavior at low temperature as we
raise the value of the magnetic field. We finally spell out some limitations of
our study.Comment: 25 pages, 3 figures, published versio