Probing QCD critical fluctuations from intermittency analysis in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
Abstract
It is shown that intermittency, a self-similar correlation with respect to the size of the phase space volume, is sensitive to critical density fluctuations of baryon numbers in a system belonging to the three-dimensional (3D) Ising universality class. The relation between intermittency index and relative baryon density fluctuation is obtained. We thus suggest that measuring the intermittency in relativistic heavy-ion collisions could be used as a good probe of density fluctuations associated with the QCD critical phenomena. From recent preliminary results on neutron density fluctuations in central Au + Au collisions at = 7.7, 11.5, 19.6, 27, 39, 62.4 and 200 GeV at RHIC/STAR, the collision energy dependence of intermittency index is extracted and shows a non-monotonic behavior with a peak at around 20 - 27 GeV, indicating that the strength of intermittency becomes the largest in this energy region. The transport UrQMD model without implementing critical physics cannot describe the observed behavior.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1901.11193,
title = {Probing QCD critical fluctuations from intermittency analysis in relativistic heavy-ion collisions},
author = {Jin Wu and Yufu Lin and Yuanfang Wu and Zhiming Li},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.11193},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Replaced with the published version