Abstract
Fluctuations of conserved quantities such as baryon number, charge, and strangeness are sensitive to the correlation length of the hot and dense matter created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions and can be used to search for the QCD critical point. We report the first measurements of the moments of net-kaon multiplicity distributions in Au+Au collisions at sNN=7.7, 11.5, 14.5, 19.6, 27, 39, 62.4, and 200 GeV. The collision centrality and energy dependence of the mean (M), variance (σ2), skewness (S), and kurtosis (κ) for net-kaon multiplicity distributions as well as the ratio σ2/M and the products Sσ and κσ2 are presented. Comparisons are made with Poisson and negative binomial baseline calculations as well as with UrQMD, a transport model (UrQMD) that does not include effects from the QCD critical point. Within current uncertainties, the net-kaon cumulant ratios appear to be monotonic as a function of collision energy.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 551-560 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | Physics Letters B |
Volume | 785 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Oct 10 2018 |
Externally published | Yes |
Funding
We thank the RHIC Operations Group and RCF at BNL, the NERSC Center at LBNL, and the Open Science Grid consortium for providing resources and support. This work was supported in part by the Office of Nuclear Physics within the U.S. DOE Office of Science , the U.S. National Science Foundation , the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation , National Natural Science Foundation of China , Chinese Academy of Sciences , the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation , National Natural Science Foundation of China , Chinese Academy of Sciences , the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China (973 Programme No. 2015CB856900 ) and the Chinese Ministry of Education , the National Research Foundation of Korea , Czech Science Foundation and Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic, Department of Atomic Energy and Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India ; the National Science Centre of Poland , National Research Foundation , the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports of the Republic of Croatia, ROSATOM of Russia and German Bundesministerium fur Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung and Technologie ( BMBF ) and the Helmholtz Association . We thank the RHIC Operations Group and RCF at BNL, the NERSC Center at LBNL, and the Open Science Grid consortium for providing resources and support. This work was supported in part by the Office of Nuclear Physics within the U.S. DOE Office of Science, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China (973 Programme No. 2015CB856900) and the Chinese Ministry of Education, the National Research Foundation of Korea, Czech Science Foundation and Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic, Department of Atomic Energy and Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India; the National Science Centre of Poland, National Research Foundation, the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports of the Republic of Croatia, ROSATOM of Russia and German Bundesministerium fur Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung and Technologie (BMBF) and the Helmholtz Association.