  The neighborhood of the QCD chiral critical point is characterized by intense
fluctuations of the chiral field which could, in principle, generate pronounced
experimental signatures. However, experimental uncertainties which are inherent
to heavy ion collisions, as well as the modest size and duration of the formed
plasma, will severely attenuate these signatures. Using Monte Carlo techniques,
we study second-order event-by-event moments of pions as a prototype for
signatures of the chiral critical point based on the enhancement of the
correlation length and event-by-event analysis. We test their viability against
some realistic ingredients, similar to the ones found in the RHIC Beam Energy
Scan program.
