Paper

Energy Dependence of Intermittency for Charged Hadrons in Au+Au Collisions at RHIC

Sinha, P, Mondal, M M, Ahammed, Z, Jalotra, A, Sharma, M, Feng, Y, Yan, Z, M Calderón de la Barca Sánchez, Lewis, N, Gopal, K, Nigmatkulov, G, N Xu, Y Wu, Kimelman, B, Z Tu, Xu, Q H, Herrmann, N, Geurts, F, Ray, R L, Hamed, A, Sweger, Z W, He, X H, X Ju, Aggarwal, I, Tarnowsky, T, G Van Buren, Surrow, B, Voloshin, S A, Magdy, N, Fazio, S, Jacobs, W W, Tribble, R E, Liang, Y, Zhao, F, Pluta, J, Yan, G, Abdulhamid, M I, Zhao, J, Seger, J, Kikoła, D P, L Ma, Przybycien, M, Liang, X, Judd, E G, W Li, Zhao, M, STAR Collaboration, Mioduszewski, S, Westfall, G D, C Hu, Thomas, J H, Gao, T, Reed, R, Lomicky, O, Sharma, N, Mohanty, B, Nie, M, Sharma, R, Jin, C, Liu, Y, Liu, X, Drachenberg, J L, Qin, Z, Liu, Z, Liu, T, Seto, R, Seyboth, P, Mazer, J A, Eyser, O, Y Yu, Grosnick, D, Huang, H Z, X Li, Liu, L, Truhlar, T, Wang, F, Srivastava, B, Skoby, M J, Wang, G, Kramarik, L, Robotkova, M, Wang, J, Roy, D, Singha, S, Putschke, J, Brandenburg, J D, Feng, C J, Gagliardi, C A, Ma, Y G, Longacre, R S, Song, Y, Wang, X, Wang, Z, Zhang, W, Wang, Y, Zhang, S, R Ma, Okubo, K, Verkest, V, Y He

2023

Overview

Density fluctuations near the QCD critical point can be probed via an intermittency analysis in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. We report the first measurement of intermittency in Au\\(+\\)Au collisions at \\(\\sqrt{s_\\mathrm{_{NN}}}\\) = 7.7-200 GeV measured by the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The scaled factorial moments of identified charged hadrons are analyzed at mid-rapidity and within the transverse momentum phase space. We observe a power-law behavior of scaled factorial moments in Au\\(+\\)Au collisions and a decrease in the extracted scaling exponent (\\(\\nu\\)) from peripheral to central collisions. The \\(\\nu\\) is consistent with a constant for different collisions energies in the mid-central (10-40\\%) collisions. Moreover, the \\(\\nu\\) in the 0-5\\% most central Au\\(+\\)Au collisions exhibits a non-monotonic energy dependence that reaches a possible minimum around \\(\\sqrt{s_\\mathrm{_{NN}}}\\) = 27 GeV. The physics implications on the QCD phase structure are discussed.

• Publisher: Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
• Subject: Critical point / Hadrons / Heavy ions / Intermittency / Ionic collisions / Quantum chromodynamics / Relativistic effects / Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider / Solid phases / Transverse momentum