Many-body forces and nucleon clustering near the QCD critical point

Abstract

It has been proposed that one can look for the QCD critical point (CP) by the Beam Energy Scan (BES) accurately monitoring event-by-event fluctuations. This experimental program is under way at the BNL RHIC collider. Separately, it has been studied how clustering of nucleons at freezeout affects proton multiplicity distribution and light nuclei production. It was found that even a minor increase of the range of nuclear forces dramatically increases clustering, while large correlation length $\xi$ near CP makes attraction due to binary forces unrealistically large. In this paper we show that repulsive many-body forces near CP should overcome the binary ones and effectively suppress clustering. We also discuss current experimental data and point out locations at which a certain drop in clustering may already be observed.

arXiv commentv2 has two more plots, one is improved STAR data plot, another theoretical predictions for tritium ratio without pre clustering v3 have minor changes in the text and figure caption

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Applications of Persistent Homology in Nuclear Collisions
• Many-quark interactions: Large-$N$ scaling and contribution to baryon masses
• Nucleon clustering at kinetic freezeout of heavy-ion collisions via path-integral Monte Carlo
• Examination of background effects on light-nuclei yield ratio in relativistic heavy-ion collisions