Energy dependence of intermittency for charged hadrons in Au+Au collisions at RHIC

• Published in: Physics letters. B Vol. 845
• Main Authors: Abdulhamid, M. I., Adam, J., Adams, J. R., Bellwied, R., Cai, X. Z., Caines, H., Calderón de la Barca Sánchez, M., Ceska, J., Chatterjee, A., Chen, J., Chen, Z., Choudhury, S., Chu, X., Crawford, H. J., Dale-Gau, G., Deppner, I. M., Eppley, G., Evdokimov, O., Fazio, S., Feng, Y., Flor, F. A., Gao, T., Geurts, F., Ghimire, N., Guryn, W., Harrison-Smith, H., Huang, H., Humanic, T. J., Isshiki, M., Judd, E. G., Kagamaster, S., Kauder, K., Khyzhniak, Y. V., Kimelman, B., Kincses, D., Kisel, I., Lacey, R., Landgraf, J. M., Li, Z., Liang, X., Liu, F., Liu, H., Liu, Y., Luo, X. F., Ma, L., Markert, C., Matis, H. S., Mioduszewski, S., Mohanty, B., Mondal, M. M., Nagy, M. I., Nain, A. S., Nam, J. D., Nelson, J. M., Nigmatkulov, G., Nonaka, T., Odyniec, G., Okubo, K., Pani, T., Pawlik, B., Prozorova, V., Qin, Z., Radhakrishnan, S. K., Reed, R., Ruan, L., Schmidke, W. B., Seck, F. -J., Seger, J., Shah, N., Sharma, R., Sheikh, A. I., Shen, D. Y., Shi, Y., Shou, Q. Y., Singh, J., Stanislaus, T. D.S., Stringfellow, B., Su, Y., Tang, Z., Tlusty, D., Todoroki, T., Trentalange, S., Truhlar, T., Voloshin, S. A., Wang, F., Wang, J. S., Wang, Y., Wissink, S. W., Xi, B., Xiao, Z. G., Xu, H., Ye, Z., Yi, L., Zbroszczyk, H., Zhang, D., Zhang, S., Zhang, Y., Zhou, J., Zhou, Y., Zyzak, M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier 04.09.2023
• Subjects: NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS
• ISSN: 0370-2693; 1873-2445

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 $\sqrt{s{NN}}$ = 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 (ν) from peripheral to central collisions. The ν is consistent with a constant for different collisions energies in the mid-central (10-40%) collisions. Moreover, the ν in the 0-5% most central Au+Au collisions exhibits a non-monotonic energy dependence that reaches a minimum around $\sqrt{s{NN}}$ = 27 GeV. The physics implications on the QCD phase structure are discussed.