The preliminary STAR data for proton cumulants for central collisions at \sqrt{s}=7.7 GeV are consistent with a two-component proton multiplicity distribution. We show that this two-component distribution is statistics friendly in that factorial cumulants of surprisingly high orders may be extracted with a relatively small number of events. As a consequence the two-component model can be tested and verified right now with the presently available STAR data from the first phase of the RHIC beam energy scan.
We demonstrate that the multiplicity distribution of a system located in the vicinity of a first-order phase transition can be successfully measured in terms of its factorial cumulants with a surprisingly small number of events. This finding has direct implications for the experimental search of a QCD phase transition conjectured to be located in the high baryon density region of the QCD phase diagram.
The description of hadron production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions in the statistical hadronization model is very good, over a broad range of collision energy. We outline this both for the light (u, d, s) and heavy (charm) quarks and discuss the connection it brings to the phase diagram of QCD.
We present the status of the description of hadron production in central nucleus-nucleus collisions within the statistical model . The recent inclusion of very high-mass resonances and the sigma meson leads to an improved description of the data, in particular the energy dependence of the K+/pi+ ratio at SPS energies (``the horn''). The connection to the QCD phase diagram is discussed.
From the viewpoint of statistical physics, nuclear matter is a strongly correlated many-particle system. Several regimes of the QCD phase diagram should exhibit strong correlations. Here I focus on three- and four-body correlations that might be important in the phase diagram.
We show that the Aharonov-Bohm effect in the nuclear matrix model derives the statistical nature of nucleons in holographic QCD. For N_c= odd (even), the nucleon is shown to be a fermion (boson).
We study the QCD phase transition based on the statistical treatment with the bag-model picture of hadrons, and derive a phenomenological relation among the low-lying hadron masses, the hadron sizes and the critical temperature of the QCD phase transition. We apply this phenomenological relation to both full QCD and quenched QCD, and compare these results with the corresponding lattice QCD results. Whereas such a statistical approach works well in full QCD, it results in an extremely large estimate of the critical temperature in quenched QCD, which indicates a serious problem in understanding …
Ideally, the Statistical Hadronization Model (SHM) freeze-out curve should reveal the QCD parton-hadron phase transformation line in the ($T$,$μ_B$) plane. We discuss the effects of various final state interaction phenomena, like baryon-antibaryon annihilation, core-corona effects or QCD critical point formation, which shift or deform the SHM freezeout curve. In particular, we present a method to remove the annihilation effects by quantifying them with the microscopic hadron transport model UrQMD. We further discuss the new aspects of hadronization that could be associated with the relatively …
We study the non-extensive Tsallis statistics and its applications to QCD and high energy physics, and analyze the possible connections of this statistics with a fractal structure of hadrons. Then, we describe how scaling properties of Yang-Mills theories allow the appearance of self-similar structures in gauge fields, which actually behave as fractals. The Tsallis entropic index, $q$, is deduced in terms of the field theory parameters, resulting in a good agreement with the value obtained experimentally.
In high multiplicity nucleus-nucleus collisions baryon-antibaryon annihilation and regeneration occur during the final hadronic expansion phase, thus distorting the initial equilibrium multiplicity ratios. We quantify the modifications employing the hybrid UrQMD transport model and apply them to the grand canonical partition functions of the Statistical Hadronization Model(SHM). We analyze minimum bias and central Pb+Pb collision data at SPS and LHC energy. We explain the Pion to Proton ratio puzzle. We also reproduce the deuteron to proton ratio at LHC energy by the SHM, and by UrQMD after at…
We investigate hadronic species freeze-out systematics in A+A collisions at low SPS energies, corresponding to a baryochemical potential above 300 MeV, analyzing NA49 hadron production data in the framework of the statistical hadronization model, and in the UrQMD hadronic transport model. Observing no deviation from universal grand canonical hadro-chemical equilibrium freeze-out, we argue that the observed hadronic freeze-out points should universally signal the boundary line of the hadronic phase in the QCD matter phase diagram.
Nonextensive statistics has attracted attention as a description of particle spectra in nuclear collisions at QCD energies. First, we construct the equation of state by incorporating Tsallis statistics based on the hadron resonance gas and parton gas models. Thermodynamic conditions are found to impose constraints on the $q$-parameter of Tsallis distribution. Next, we apply the equation of state to the relativistic hydrodynamic modeling of nuclear collisions. The Cooper-Frye prescription is consistently modified. Numerical demonstrations indicate that the model may describe charged particle sp…
In this work we analyse how scaling properties of Yang-Mills field theory manifest as self-similarity of truncated n-point functions by scale evolution. The presence of such structures, which actually behaves as fractals, allow for recurrent non-perturbative calculation of any vertex. Some general properties are indeed independent of the perturbative order, what simplifies the non-perturbative calculations. We show that for sufficiently high perturbative orders a statistical approach can be used, the non extensive statistics is obtained, and the Tsallis index, $q$, is deduced in terms of the f…
We present our first results on a direct computation of the complex in-medium heavy quark potential from realistic lattice QCD simulations. Ensembles with $N_τ=12$ from the HotQCD and TUMQCD collaboration offer unprecedented high statistics, those with $N_τ=16$ unprecedented time resolution, making possible a robust extraction of the real part from the spectral functions of Wilson line correlators. To this end we deploy a combination of a Bayesian reconstruction (BR method), as well as a Padé-like approximation. We corroborate findings made on less realistic lattices that ${\rm Re}[V]$ smoothl…
In a series of articles it was recently claimed that the quantum chromodynamic (QCD) condensates are not the properties of the vacuum but of the hadrons and are confined inside them. We point out that this claim is incompatible with the chiral Lagrangian and Bose-Einstein statistics of the Goldstone bosons (pions) in chiral limit and conclude that the quark condensate must be the property of the QCD vacuum.
Realizing the full potential of interconnecting the large amounts of data created in physics experiments, phenomenological models and theory simulations requires robust tools for statistical inference. Here I review a particularly promising branch, Bayesian statistics, which over the past decade has found manifold use in high-energy physics. After a brief introduction to Bayesian statistics I will present two concrete examples, where Bayesian thinking has led to progress in understanding strongly interacting matter: unfolding problems in the form of lattice QCD spectral functions (in spirit si…
We analyze hadrochemical freeze-out in central Pb+Pb collisions at CERN SPS and LHC energies. We determine the effects of baryon and antibaryon annihilation and/or regeneration occurring during the final cascade expansion stage of the collisions by deriving "survival factors" for each hadronic species and all energies considered by employing the UrQMD hybrid model. These survival factors are shown to resemble the pattern of data deviation from the statistical equilibrium calculations with the statistical model. We apply them in the SM data analysis, obtaining new points in the $T-μ_B$ plane wh…
The dynamics of QCD matter is often described using effective mean field (MF) models based on Boltzmann-Gibbs (BG) extensive statistics. However, such matter is normally produced in small packets and in violent collisions where the usual conditions justifying the use of BG statistics are not fulfilled and the systems produced are not extensive. This can be accounted for either by enriching the original dynamics or by replacing the BG statistics by its nonextensive counterpart described by a nonextensivity parameter $q\neq 1$ (for $q \to 1$ one returns to the extensive situation). In this work …
We present new results on up to $6^{th}$ order cumulants of net baryon-number fluctuations at small values of the baryon chemical potential, $μ_B$, obtained in lattice QCD calculations with physical values of light and strange quark masses. Representation of the Taylor expansions of higher order cumulants in terms of the ratio of the two lowest order cumulants, $M_B/σ_B^2=χ_1^B(T,μ_B)/χ_2^B(T,μ_B)$, allows for a parameter free comparison with data on net proton-number cumulants obtained by the STAR Collaboration in the Beam Energy Scan at RHIC. We show that recent high statistics data on skewn…
I review the physics of the phase boundary between hadronic matter and quark matter from several different points of view. These include thermodynamics, statistical physics, and chemical kinetics. In particular, the review focuses on the role of the chemical freeze-out line and its relation to the concept of valence quark percolation. The review ends with some recollections of Jean Cleymans.
We point out that the quartic cumulant (and kurtosis) of the order parameter fluctuations is universally negative when the critical point is approached on the crossover side of the phase separation line. As a consequence, the kurtosis of a fluctuating observable, such as, e.g., proton multiplicity, may become smaller than the value given by independent Poisson statistics. We discuss implications for the Beam Energy Scan program at RHIC.
We present the status of the chemical freeze-out, determined from fits of hadron yields with the statistical hadronization (thermal) model, with focus on the data at the LHC. A description of the yields of hadrons containing light quarks as well as the application of the model for the production of the J/$ψ$ meson is presented. The implications for the QCD phase diagram are discussed.
Many measurements of quarkonium suppression at the LHC, e.g. the nuclear modification factor $R_{AA}$ of $J/Ψ$, are well described by a multitude of different models. Thus pinpointing the underlying physics aspects is difficult and guidance based on first principles is needed. Here we present the current status of our ongoing high precision study of in-medium spectral properties of both bottomonium and charmonium based on NRQCD on the lattice. This effective field theory allows us to capture the physics of quarkonium without modeling assumptions in a thermal QCD medium. In our study a first pr…
We present a non-extensive version of the Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model which is based on the non-extentive statistical mechanics. This new statistics is characterized by a dimensionless non-extensivity parameter $q$ that accounts for all possible effects violating the assumptions of the Boltzmann-Gibbs statistics (when $q\rightarrow1$, it returns to the Boltzmann-Gibbs case). Using this q-Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model and including two different Polyakov-loop potentials, we discussed the influence of the parameter $q$ on chiral and deconfinement phase transition, various thermodynamic…
A systematic analysis of the structure of single-baryon correlation functions calculated with lattice QCD is performed, with a particular focus on characterizing the structure of the noise associated with quantum fluctuations. The signal-to-noise problem in these correlation functions is shown, as long suspected, to result from a sign problem. The log-magnitude and complex phase are found to be approximately described by normal and wrapped normal distributions respectively. Properties of circular statistics are used to understand the emergence of a large time noise region where standard energy…
We propose a framework for quantitative evaluation of dynamical tendency for polarization in arbitrary random variable that can be decomposed into a pair of orthogonal subspaces. The method uses measures based on comparisons of given dynamics to its counterpart with statistically independent components. The formalism of previously considered X-distributions is used to express the aforementioned comparisons, in effect putting the former approach on solid footing. Our analysis leads to definition of a suitable correlation coefficient with clear statistical meaning. We apply the method to the dyn…
We determine the net-baryon multiplicity distribution which reproduces all cumulants measured so far by lattice QCD. We present the dependence on the volume and temperature of this distribution. We find that for temperatures and volumes encountered in heavy ion reactions, the multiplicity distribution is very close to the Skellam distribution, making the experimental determination of it rather challenging. We further provide estimates for the statistics required to measure cumulants of the net-baryon and net-proton distributions.
