No Arabic abstract
We discuss the properties of hadronic fluctuations, i.e. fluctuations of net quark and isospin numbers as well as electric charge, in the vicinity of the QCD transition in isospin-symmetric matter at vanishing quark chemical potential. We analyse second- and fourth-order cumulants of these fluctuations and argue that the ratio of quartic and quadratic cumulants reflects the relevant degrees of freedom that carry the quark number, isospin or charge, respectively. In the hadronic phase we find that an enhancement of charge fluctuations arises from contributions of doubly charged hadrons to the thermodynamics. The rapid suppression of fluctuations seen in the high-temperature phase suggests that in the QGP, net quark number and electric charge are predominantly carried by quasi-particles, with the quantum numbers of quarks.
We extract the spectral functions in the scalar, pseudo-scalar, vector, and axial vector channels above the deconfinement phase transition temperature (Tc) using the maximum entropy method (MEM). We use anisotropic lattices, 32^3 * 32, 40, 54, 72, 80, and 96 (corresponding to T = 2.3 Tc --> 0.8 Tc), with the renormalized anisotropy xi = 4.0 to have enough temporal data points to carry out the MEM analysis. Our result suggests that the spectral functions continue to possess non-trivial structures even above Tc and in addition that there is a qualitative change in the state of the deconfined matter between 1.5 Tc and 2 Tc.
We consider the Polyakov loop-extended two flavor chiral quark--meson model and discuss critical phenomena related with the spontaneous breaking of the chiral symmetry. The model is explored beyond the mean-field approximation in the framework of the functional renormalisation group. We discuss properties of the net-quark number density fluctuations as well as their higher cumulants. We show that with the increasing net-quark number density, the higher order cumulants exhibit a strong sensitivity to the chiral crossover transition. We discuss their role as probes of the chiral phase transition in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and LHC.
We discuss the relevance of higher order moments of net baryon number fluctuations for the analysis of freeze-out and critical conditions in heavy ion collisions at LHC and RHIC. Using properties of O(4) scaling functions, we discuss the generic structure of these higher moments at vanishing baryon chemical potential and apply chiral model calculations to explore their properties at non-zero baryon chemical potential. We show that the ratios of the sixth to second and eighth to second order moments of the net baryon number fluctuations change rapidly in the transition region of the QCD phase diagram. Already at vanishing baryon chemical potential they deviate considerably from the predictions of the hadron resonance gas model which reproduce the second to fourth order moments of the net proton number fluctuations at RHIC. We point out that the sixth order moments of baryon number and electric charge fluctuations remain negative at the chiral transition temperature. Thus, they offer the possibility to probe the proximity of the thermal freeze-out to the crossover line.
We investigate the phase structure of strongly interacting matter and baryon number fluctuations in the Polyakov loop improved Nambu--Jona-Lasinio (PNJL) model. The calculation shows that both the chiral and deconfinement transitions, as well as their coincidence and separation determine the basic QCD phase structure. The contour maps and the three-dimensional diagrams of the net-baryon kurtosis and skewness present well the trace of QCD phase structure. Comparing with the experimental data, we find that the existence of a critical end point (CEP) of chiral transition is crucial to explain the non-monotonic energy dependence and the large deviation from Poisson baseline of net-proton kurtosis. In particular, the relation between the chiral and deconfinement transitions in the crossover region is also reflected by the baryon number fluctuations. This study shows that the measurements of higher moments of multiplicity distributions of conserved charges are powerful to investigate the criticality and even the chiral and deconfinement transitions in the crossover region.
The region of large net-baryon densities in the QCD phase diagram is expected to exhibit a first-order phase transition. Experimentally, its study will be one of the primaryobjectives for the upcoming FAIR accelerator. We model the transition between quarks and hadrons in a heavy-ion collision using a fluid which is coupled to the explicit dynamics of the chiral order parameter and a dilaton field. This allows us to investigate signals stemming from the nonequilibrium evolution during the expansion of the hot plasma. Special emphasis is put on an event-by-event analysis of baryon number fluctuations which have long since been claimed to be sensitive to a critical point.