Estimation of stopped protons at energies relevant for a beam energy scan at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

Dhananjaya Thakur, Sunil Jakhar, Prakhar Garg, and Raghunath Sahoo
Phys. Rev. C 95, 044903 – Published 10 April 2017

Abstract

The recent net-proton fluctuation results of the STAR (Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC) experiment from the beam energy scan (BES) program at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have drawn much attention to exploring the QCD critical point and the nature of deconfinement phase transition. There has been much speculation that the nonmonotonic behavior of κσ2 of the produced protons around sNN = 19.6 GeV in the STAR results may be due to the existence of a QCD critical point. However, the experimentally measured proton distributions contain protons from heavy resonance decays, from baryon stopping, and from direct production processes. These proton distributions are used to estimate the net-proton number fluctuation. Because it is difficult to disentangle the protons from the above-mentioned sources, it is better to devise a method which will account for the directly produced baryons (protons) to study the dynamical fluctuation at different center-of-mass energies. This is because it is assumed that any associated criticality in the system could affect the particle production mechanism and hence the dynamical fluctuation in various conserved numbers. In the present work, we demonstrate a method to estimate the number of stopped protons at RHIC BES energies for central 0–5% Au+Au collisions within STAR acceptance and discuss its implications on the net-proton fluctuation results.

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  • Received 14 November 2016
  • Revised 1 February 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.95.044903

©2017 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Nuclear Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Dhananjaya Thakur1, Sunil Jakhar1, Prakhar Garg1,2, and Raghunath Sahoo1,*

  • 1Discipline of Physics, School of Basic Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Indore, Indore 453552, India
  • 2Department of Physics and Astronomy, Stony Brook University, SUNY, Stony Brook, New York 11794-3800, USA

  • *Raghunath.Sahoo@cern.ch

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Vol. 95, Iss. 4 — April 2017

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