Baryon number and charge fluctuations from lattice QCD

Abstract

We calculate electric and baryonic charge fluctuations on the lattice. Results have been obtained with the highly improved staggered quark action (HISQ) and almost physical quark masses on lattices with spacial extent of $N_{\tau }=6,8,12$. Higher order cumulants of the net-charge distributions are increasingly dominated by a universal scaling behavior, which is arising due to a critical point of QCD in the chiral limit. Considering cumulants up to the sixth order, we observe that they generically behave as expected from universal scaling laws, which is quite different from the cumulants calculated within the hadron resonance gas model. Taking ratios of these cumulants, we obtain volume independent results that can be compared to the experimental measurements. Such a comparison will unambiguously relate the QCD transition temperature that has been determined on the lattice with the freeze out temperature of heavy ion collision at LHC and RHIC.

4 pages, 2 figures, contribution to the proceedings of the Quark Matter 2012 International Conference, August 13-18, 2012, Washington DC, USA

References in corpus (5)

• The chiral and deconfinement aspects of the QCD transition
• Fluctuations and Correlations of net baryon number, electric charge, and strangeness: A comparison of lattice QCD results with the hadron resonance gas model
• Freeze-out Conditions in Heavy Ion Collisions from QCD Thermodynamics
• The phase boundary for the chiral transition in (2+1)-flavor QCD at small values of the chemical potential
• The scaling functions of the free energy density and its derivatives for the 3d O(4) model

Cited by in corpus (12)

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• Phase Transitions in Particle Physics -- Results and Perspectives from Lattice Quantum Chromo-Dynamics
• Equation of State of hot and dense QCD: Resummed perturbation theory confronts lattice data
• Critical behaviors near the (tri-)critical end point of QCD within the NJL model
• Probing the States of Matter in QCD
• Polyakov loop fluctuations in Dirac eigenmode expansion
• Review of recent highlights in lattice calculations at finite temperature and finite density
• Selected Issues in Thermal Field Theory
• From Heavy-Ion Collisions to Compact Stars: Equation of State and Relevance of the System Size
• Probing the finite density equation of state of QCD via resummed perturbation theory
• Kurtoses and high order cumulants: Insights from resummed perturbation theory
• Conserved charge fluctuations with HISQ fermions