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Searching for the QCD critical point via the rapidity dependence of cumulants

Jasmine Brewer, Swagato Mukherjee, Krishna Rajagopal, and Yi Yin
Phys. Rev. C 98, 061901(R) – Published 13 December 2018

Abstract

The search for a possible critical point in the QCD phase diagram is ongoing in heavy-ion collision experiments at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) which scan the phase diagram by scanning the beam energy; a coming upgrade will increase the luminosity and extend the rapidity acceptance of the solenoidal tracker at RHIC (STAR) detector. In fireballs produced in RHIC collisions, the baryon density depends on rapidity. By employing Ising universality together with a phenomenologically motivated freeze-out prescription, we show that the resulting rapidity dependence of cumulant observables sensitive to critical fluctuations is distinctive. The dependence of the kurtosis (of the event-by-event distribution of the number of protons) on rapidity near midrapidity will change qualitatively if a critical point is passed in the scan. Hence, measuring the rapidity dependence of cumulant observables can enhance the prospect of discovering a critical point, in particular if it lies between two energies in the beam energy scan.

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  • Received 18 May 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.98.061901

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Nuclear Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Jasmine Brewer1, Swagato Mukherjee2, Krishna Rajagopal1, and Yi Yin1

  • 1Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
  • 2Physics Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973, USA

Article Text

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Issue

Vol. 98, Iss. 6 — December 2018

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