Collision-energy dependence of second-order off-diagonal and diagonal cumulants of net-charge, net-proton, and net-kaon multiplicity distributions in Au + Au collisions

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27 Scopus citations

Abstract

We report the first measurements of a complete second-order cumulant matrix of net-charge, net-proton, and net-kaon multiplicity distributions for the first phase of the beam energy scan program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. This includes the centrality and, for the first time, the pseudorapidity window dependence of both diagonal and off-diagonal cumulants in Au+Au collisions at sNN= 7.7-200 GeV. Within the available acceptance of |η|<0.5, the cumulants grow linearly with the pseudorapidity window. Relative to the corresponding measurements in peripheral collisions, the ratio of off-diagonal over diagonal cumulants in central collisions indicates an excess correlation between net-charge and net-kaon, as well as between net-charge and net-proton. The strength of such excess correlation increases with the collision energy. The correlation between net-proton and net-kaon multiplicity distributions is observed to be negative at sNN= 200 GeV and change to positive at the lowest collision energy. Model calculations based on nonthermal (UrQMD) and thermal (HRG) production of hadrons cannot explain the data. These measurements will help map the quantum chromodynamics phase diagram, constrain hadron resonance gas model calculations and provide new insights on the energy dependence of baryon-strangeness correlations.

Original languageEnglish
Article number014902
JournalPhysical Review C
Volume100
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 8 2019

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We are grateful to Jacquelyn Noronha-Hostler for providing the HRG model calculations. We are thankful to Jorge Noronha, Sandeep Chatterjee, Sayantan Sharma, Swagato Mukherjee, Frithjof Karsch, Volodymyr Vovchenko, Sourendu Gupta, Rajiv V. Gavai, and Che Ming Ko for the fruitful discussions. 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 Science, the Ministry of Science and Technology of China 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, the Ministry of Science, Education, and Sports of the Republic of Croatia, RosAtom of Russia and German Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung and Technologie (BMBF), and the Helmholtz Association.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 American Physical Society.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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