Closing in on critical net-baryon fluctuations at LHC energies: cumulants up to third order in Pb$-$Pb collisions

Abstract

Fluctuation measurements are important sources of information on the mechanism of particle production at LHC energies. This article reports the first experimental results on third-order cumulants of the net-proton distributions in Pb$-$Pb collisions at a center-of-mass energy $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=5.02$ TeV recorded by the ALICE detector. The results on the second-order cumulants of net-proton distributions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=2.76$ and $5.02$ TeV are also discussed in view of effects due to the global and local baryon number conservation. The results demonstrate the presence of long-range rapidity correlations between protons and antiprotons. Such correlations originate from the early phase of the collision. The experimental results are compared with HIJING and EPOS model calculations, and the dependence of the fluctuation measurements on the phase-space coverage is examined in the context of lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD) and hadron resonance gas (HRG) model estimations. The measured third-order cumulants are consistent with zero within experimental uncertainties of about 4% and are described well by LQCD and HRG predictions.

22 pages, 7 captioned figures, authors from page 17, published version, figures at http://alice-publications.web.cern.ch/node/8232

References in corpus (13)

• Glauber Modeling in High Energy Nuclear Collisions
• The QCD crossover at finite chemical potential from lattice simulations
• Challenges in QCD matter physics - The Compressed Baryonic Matter experiment at FAIR
• Skewness, kurtosis and the 5th and 6th order cumulants of net baryon-number distributions from lattice QCD confront high-statistics STAR data
• Relativistic nuclear collisions: Establishing a non-critical baseline for fluctuation measurements
• Skewness and kurtosis of net baryon-number distributions at small values of the baryon chemical potential
• Global baryon number conservation encoded in net-proton fluctuations measured in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 2.76 TeV
• Letter of intent for ALICE 3: A next-generation heavy-ion experiment at the LHC
• Particlization of an interacting hadron resonance gas with global conservation laws for event-by-event fluctuations in heavy-ion collisions
• Identity Method for the Determination of the Moments of Multiplicity Distributions
• Identity method to study chemical fluctuations in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Constraining baryon annihilation in the hadronic phase of heavy-ion collisions via event-by-event fluctuations
• Track Reconstruction in a High-Density Environment with ALICE

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Theoretical and Experimental Constraints for the Equation of State of Dense and Hot Matter
• Magnetic field effect on hadron yield ratios and fluctuations in a hadron resonance gas
• Density correlations under global and local charge conservation
• Acceptance dependence of factorial cumulants, long-range correlations, and the antiproton puzzle
• Probing strangeness hadronization with event-by-event production of multistrange hadrons