Physics Letters B (Feb 2020)

Probing QCD critical fluctuations from intermittency analysis in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

  • Jin Wu,
  • Yufu Lin,
  • Yuanfang Wu,
  • Zhiming Li

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 801

Abstract

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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 sNN=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.