No Arabic abstract
We calculate several diagonal and non-diagonal fluctuations of conserved charges in a system of 2+1+1 quark flavors with physical masses, on a lattice with size $48^3times12$. Higher order fluctuations at $mu_B=0$ are obtained as derivatives of the lower order ones, simulated at imaginary chemical potential. From these correlations and fluctuations we construct ratios of net-baryon number cumulants as functions of temperature and chemical potential, which satisfy the experimental conditions of strangeness neutrality and proton/baryon ratio. Our results qualitatively explain the behavior of the measured cumulant ratios by the STAR collaboration.
We discuss the next-to-leading order Taylor expansion of ratios of cumulants of net-baryon number fluctuations. We focus on the relation between the skewness ratio, $S_Bsigma_B = chi_3^B/chi_1^B$, and the kurtosis ratio, $kappa_Bsigma_B^2 =chi_4^B/chi_2^B$. We show that differences in these two cumulant ratios are small for small values of the baryon chemical potential. The next-to-leading order correction to $kappa_Bsigma_B^2$ however is approximately three times larger than that for $S_Bsigma_B$. The former thus drops much more rapidly with increasing beam energy, $sqrt{s_{NN}}$. We argue that these generic patterns are consistent with current data on cumulants of net-proton number fluctuations measured by the STAR Collaboration at $sqrt{s_{NN}}ge 19.6$~GeV.
Like fluctuations, non-diagonal correlators of conserved charges provide a tool for the study of chemical freeze-out in heavy ion collisions. They can be calculated in thermal equilibrium using lattice simulations, and be connected to moments of event-by-event net-particle multiplicity distributions. We calculate them from continuum extrapolated lattice simulations at $mu_B=0$, and present a finite-$mu_B$ extrapolation, comparing two different methods. In order to relate the grand canonical observables to the experimentally available net-particle fluctuations and correlations, we perform a Hadron Resonance Gas (HRG) model analysis, which allows us to completely break down the contributions from different hadrons. We then construct suitable hadronic proxies for fluctuations ratios, and study their behavior at finite chemical potentials. We also study the effect of introducing acceptance cuts, and argue that the small dependence of certain ratios on the latter allows for a direct comparison with lattice QCD results, provided that the same cuts are applied to all hadronic species. Finally, we perform a comparison for the constructed quantities for experimentally available measurements from the STAR Collaboration. Thus, we estimate the chemical freeze-out temperature to 165 MeV using a strangeness-related proxy. This is a rather high temperature for the use of the Hadron Resonance Gas, thus, further lattice studies are necessary to provide first principle results at intermediate $mu_B$.
Using the sample produced by the AMPT default model, we construct a corresponding mixed sample by the method of mixed events. The mixed sample provides an effective estimation for non-critical fluctuations which are caused by global and systematic effects. The dynamical cumulants of conserved charges are defined as the cumulants of the original sample minus the cumulants of the mixed sample. It is demonstrated that dynamical cumulants are subtracted statistical fluctuations, and centrality bin width or detection efficiency independent, in consistent with formulae corrected cumulants. Therefore, dynamical cumulants are helpful in obtaining critical fluctuations at the RHIC BES.
We construct net baryon number and strangeness susceptibilities as well as correlations between electric charge, strangeness and baryon number from experimental data on the particle production yields at midrapidity of the ALICE Collaboration at CERN. The data were taken in central Pb-Pb collisions at $sqrt{s_{rm NN}}$~=~2.76~TeV and cover one unit of rapidity. We show that the resulting fluctuations and correlations are consistent with Lattice QCD results at the chiral crossover pseudocritical temperature $T_{c} simeq$ 155 MeV. This agreement lends strong support to the assumption that the fireball created in these collisions is of thermal origin and exhibits characteristic properties expected in QCD at the transition from the quark gluon plasma to the hadronic phase. Since Lattice QCD calculations are performed at a baryochemical potential of $mu_{B}$ = 0, the comparisons with LHC data are the most direct due to the vanishing baryon transport to midrapidity at these high energies.
Complete flavour decompositions of the scalar, axial and tensor charges of the proton, deuteron, diproton and $^3$He at SU(3)-symmetric values of the quark masses corresponding to a pion mass $m_pisim806$ MeV are determined using lattice QCD. At the physical quark masses, the scalar charges constrain mean-field models of nuclei and the low-energy interactions of nuclei with potential dark matter candidates. The axial and tensor charges of nuclei constrain their spin content, integrated transversity and the quark contributions to their electric dipole moments. External fields are used to directly access the quark-line connected matrix elements of quark bilinear operators, and a combination of stochastic estimation techniques is used to determine the disconnected sea-quark contributions. Significant nuclear modifications are found, with particularly large, O(10%), effects in the scalar charges. Typically, these nuclear effects reduce the effective charge of the nucleon (quenching), although in some cases an enhancement is not excluded. Given the size of the nuclear modifications of the scalar charges resolved here, contributions from correlated multi-nucleon effects should be quantified in the analysis of dark matter direct-detection experiments using nuclear targets.