Critical versus spurious fluctuations in the search for the QCD critical point

Abstract

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.

References in corpus (8)

• Systematic Measurements of Identified Particle Spectra in pp, d+Au and Au+Au Collisions from STAR
• Real time evolution of non-Gaussian cumulants in the QCD critical regime
• Strongly Intensive Quantities
• Observation of the critical end point in the phase diagram for hot and dense nuclear matter
• Finite-size scaling as a tool in the search for the QCD critical point in heavy ion data
• Baseline study for higher moments of net-charge distribution at RHIC energies
• Evolution of Critical Correlations at the QCD Phase Transition
• Evolutionary intermittency and the QCD critical point

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Theoretical and Experimental Constraints for the Equation of State of Dense and Hot Matter
• Cumulants and Correlation Functions vs the QCD phase diagram
• Far-from-equilibrium search for the QCD critical point
• Baryon number fluctuations in chiral effective models and their phenomenological implications
• Properties and uses of factorial cumulants in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Correlating the skewness and kurtosis of baryon number distributions
• Dynamical evolution of critical fluctuations and its observation in heavy ion collisions
• Volume dependence of baryon number cumulants and their ratios
• The QCD Critical Point and Related Observables
• Dynamics of critical fluctuations: Theory -- phenomenology -- heavy-ion collisions
• Multiplicity fluctuations near the QCD critical point
• Volume effects on the QCD critical end point from thermal fluctuations within the super statistics framework
• Hydrodynamic results on multiplicity fluctuations in heavy-ion collisions
• Features of the QCD phase diagram from small, noisy, fluctuating systems