Scale for the Phase Diagram of Quantum Chromodynamics

Abstract

Matter described by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interactions, may undergo phase transitions when its temperature and the chemical potentials are varied. QCD at finite temperature is studied in the laboratory by colliding heavy-ions at varying beam energies. We present a test of QCD in the non-perturbative domain through a comparison of thermodynamic fluctuations predicted in lattice computations with the experimental data of baryon number distributions in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. This study provides evidence for thermalization in these collisions, and allows us to find the crossover temperature between normal nuclear matter and a deconfined phase called the quark gluon plasma. This value allows us to set a scale for the phase diagram of QCD.

16 pages and 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Science

References in corpus (6)

• The order of the quantum chromodynamics transition predicted by the standard model of particle physics
• Systematic Measurements of Identified Particle Spectra in pp, d+Au and Au+Au Collisions from STAR
• The QCD transition temperature: results with physical masses in the continuum limit
• The transition temperature in QCD
• Probing freeze-out conditions in heavy ion collisions with moments of charge fluctuations
• Uniform Memory and Serialization for Lambda Calculus