Deciphering the phases of QCD matter with fluctuations and correlations of conserved charges

Abstract

A review is given on recent experimental and theoretical/phenomenological developments regarding the phase structure of the strongly interacting matter. Specifically, evolution with collision energy of netproton number fluctuations as measured by several experiments are presented and their implications for the QCD phase diagram are outlined. In addition, theoretical calculations on correlations between conserved charges are presented and prospects for their experimental explorations are addressed.