A brief overview of the recent developments concerning theoretical description of event-by-event fluctuations in heavy-ion collisions is presented, with an emphasis on the role of exact conservation laws and calculations based on relativistic hydrodynamics.
We study the correlation between the distributions of the net-charge, net-kaon, net-baryon and net-proton number at hadronization and after the final hadronic decoupling by simulating ultra relativistic heavy ion collisions with the hybrid version of the ultrarelativistic quantum molecular dynamics (UrQMD) model. We find that due to the hadronic rescattering these distributions are not strongly correlated. The calculated change of the correlation, during the hadronic expansion stage, does not support the recent paradigm, namely that the measured final moments of the experimentally observed dis…
The thermodynamics of hot and dense matter created in heavy-ion collision experiments are usually studied as a system of infinite volume. Here we report on possible effects for considering a finite system size for such matter in the framework of the Hadron Resonance Gas model. The bulk thermodynamic variables as well as the fluctuations of conserved charges are considered. We find that the finite size effects are insignificant once the observables are scaled with the respective volumes. The only substantial effect is found in the fluctuations of electric charge which may therefore be used to e…
We investigate the effects of repulsive interaction between hadrons on the fluctuations of the conserved charges. We calculate the baryon,the electric charge and the strangeness susceptibilities within the ambit of hadron resonance gas model extended to include the short range repulsive interactions.The repulsive interactions are included through a mean-field approach where the single particle energy gets modified due to mean field interactions between hadrons proportional to the number density of hadrons.We assume different mean-field interactions for mesons and baryons. It is shown that the …
We present temperature ($T$) and baryonic chemical potential ($μ_B$) dependence of higher order fluctuations and correlation between conserved charges in Excluded Volume Hadron Resonance Gas (EVHRG) model. Products of moments, such as ratio of variance to mean ($σ^2/M)$, product of skewness and standard deviation ($Sσ$), product of kurtosis and variance ($κσ^2$), for net-proton, net-kaon and net-charge have been evaluated on the phenomenologically determined freeze-out curve. Further, products of moments for net-proton and net-charge have been compared with the experimental data measured by ST…
We initialize the Quantum Chromodynamic conserved charges of baryon number, strangeness, and electric charge arising from gluon splitting into quark-antiquark pairs for the initial conditions of relativistic heavy-ion collisions. A new Monte Carlo procedure that can sample from a generic energy density profile is presented, called Initial Conserved Charges in Nuclear Geometry (ICCING), based on quark and gluon multiplicities derived within the color glass condensate (CGC) effective theory. We find that while baryon number and electric charge have nearly identical geometries to the energy densi…
I present an overview of recent theoretical results on fluctuations of conserved charges in heavy-ion collisions obtained in relativistic hydrodynamics and molecular dynamics frameworks. In particular, I discuss the constraints on the location of the QCD critical point based on comparisons of experimental data on proton number cumulants with precision calculations of non-critical contributions. Recent developments on critical fluctuations in molecular dynamics simulations are covered as well.
We compare recent lattice results on fluctuations and correlations of strangeness, baryon number and electric charge obtained with p4 improved staggered action with the prediction of hadron resonance gas model. We show that hadron resonance gas can describe these fluctuations reasonably well if the hadron properties are as calculated on the lattice.
We study the signs of criticality in conserved charge fluctuations and related observables of finite temperature QCD at vanishing chemical potential, as we approach the chiral limit of two light quarks. Our calculations have been performed on gauge ensembles generated using Highly Improved Staggered Quark (HISQ) fermion action, with pion masses ranging from 140 MeV to 55 MeV.
General formulas are presented for higher order cumulants of the conserved charge statistical fluctuations inside the mixed phase. As a particular example the van der Waals model in the grand canonical ensemble is used. The higher order measures of the conserved charge fluctuations up to the hyperkurtosis are calculated in a vicinity of the critical point (CP). The analysis includes both the mixed phase region and the pure phases on the phase diagram. It is shown that even-order fluctuation measures, e.g. scaled variance, kurtosis, and hyperkurtosis, have only positive values in the mixed phas…
Bulk fluctuations of conserved charges measured by event-by-event analysis in relativistic heavy ion collisions are observables which are believed to carry significant amount of information on the hot medium created by the collisions. Active studies have been done recently experimentally, theoretically, and on the lattice. In particular, non-Gaussianity of the fluctuations has acquired much attention recently. In this review, we give a pedagogical introduction to these issues, and survey recent developments in this field of research. Starting from the definition of cumulants, basic concepts in…
We investigate the effect of the global charge conservation on the cumulants of conserved charges in relativistic heavy ion collisions in a finite rapidity window by studying the time evolution of cumulants in the hadronic medium. It is argued that the global charge conservation does not affect the experimental result of the net-electric charge fluctuation observed by ALICE, because of the finite diffusion distance of charged particles in the hadronic stage.
We discuss the role of repulsive baryon-baryon interactions in a hadron gas using relativistic virial expansion and repulsive mean field approaches. The fluctuations of the baryon number as well as strangeness-baryon correlations are calculated in the hadron resonance gas with repulsive interactions and compared with the recent lattice QCD results. In particular, we calculate the difference between the second and fourth order fluctuations and correlations of baryon number and strangeness, that have been proposed as probes of deconfinement. We show that for not too high temperatures these diffe…
In this work the susceptibility coefficients of the strange and non-strange quark number of second and fourth order are presented. The results at zero baryonchemical potential are obtained using a well tested chiral effective model including all known hadron degrees of freedom and additionally incorporating quarks and gluons in a PNJL model approach. Quark number susceptibilities are sensitive to the fundamental degrees of freedom in the model and signal the shift from massive hadrons to light quarks at the deconfinement transition by a sharp rise at the critical temperature. Furthermore, all …
We study the effect of charged secondaries coming from resonance decay on the net-baryon, net-charge and net-strangeness fluctuations in high energy heavy-ion collisions within the hadron resonance gas (HRG) model. We emphasize the importance of including weak decays along with other resonance decays in the HRG, while comparing with the experimental observables. The effect of kinematic cuts on resonances and primordial particles on the conserved number fluctuations are also studied. The HRG model calculations with the inclusion of resonance decays and kinematical cuts are compared with the rec…
Considering recently developed Hard Thermal Loop perturbation theory that takes into account the effect of the variation of the external field through the fluctuations of a conserved quantity we calculate the temporal component of the Euclidian correlation function in the vector channel. The results are found to be in good agreement with the very recent results obtained within the quenched approximation of QCD and small values of the quark mass ($\sim 0.1T$) on improved lattices of size $128^3\times N_τ$ at ($N_τ=40, \ T=1.2T_C$), ($N_τ=48, \ T=1.45T_C$), and ($N_τ=16, \ T=2.98T_C$), where $N_…
We update lattice QCD results for second order cumulants of conserved charge fluctuations and correlations at non-zero temperature and vanishing values of the conserved charge chemical potentials. We compare these results to hadron resonance gas calculations with and without excluded volume terms as well as S-matrix results in the hadronic phase of QCD, and comment on their current limitations. We, furthermore, use these results to characterize thermal conditions in the vicinity of the pseudo-critical line of the chiral transition in QCD. We argue that the ratio of strange to baryon chemical p…
We consider the $(2+1)$ flavor Polyakov Quark Meson Model and study the fluctuations (correlations) of conserved charges upto sixth (fourth) order. Comparison is made with lattice data wherever available and overall good qualitative agreement is found, more so for the case of the normalised susceptibilities. The model predictions for the ratio of susceptibilities go to that of an ideal gas of hadrons as in Hadron Resonance Gas Model at low temperatures while at high temperature the values are close to that of an ideal gas of massless quarks. Our study provides a strong basis for the use of PQM…
In this report we present the first quantitative determination of the correlations between baryons and anti-baryons induced by local baryon number conservation. This is important in view of the many experimental studies aiming at probing the phase structure of strongly interacting matter. We confront our results with the recent measurements of net-proton fluctuations reported by the CERN ALICE experiment. The role of local baryon number conservation is found to be small on the level of second cumulants.
We study the conserved charge fluctuations, as quantified by the corresponding susceptibilities, in strongly interacting matter as motived by the quark-gluon plasma. Using the gauge-gravity correspondence approach, we study the patterns of conserved charge fluctuations in two types of holographic models for QCD, the D4/D8 and the D3/D7 models. We compute and compare the quark number susceptibilities in both models and find an interesting common feature of the two: at very strong coupling higher order susceptibilities are suppressed and the conserved charge fluctuations become purely Guassian. …
We present here continuum extrapolated results for all 2nd order cumulants using the most recent results obtained by the HotQCD collaboration in (2+1)-flavor QCD. We constrain the applicability of various HRG models by presenting a detailed comparison of our results based on different sets of hadron spectra as well as with virial expansion based model calculations. A comparison with our lattice QCD results for 2nd order cumulants with models that parametrize repulsive interactions among baryons and anti-baryons in a hadron resonance gas through a single excluded volume parameter (EVHRG) is als…
By the generator of the UrQMD model, event statistics for the products of kurtosis ($κ$) and variance ($σ^2$) of net-proton and net-charge multiplicity distributions are carefully studied. It is shown that the statistics at RHIC/BES below $\sqrt {s_{NN}} < 19.6$ GeV are not sufficient for using the method of Centrality Bin Width Correction (CBWC). Corresponding results are systematically underestimated. A way to improve the CBWC method is proposed. It can remove the statistics dependence of the data and reduce the initial size fluctuation as well.
We simultaneously incorporate two common extensions of the hadron resonance gas model, namely the addition of extra, unconfirmed resonances to the particle list and the excluded volume repulsive interactions. We emphasize the complementary nature of these two extensions and identify combinations of conserved charge susceptibilities that allow to constrain them separately. In particular, ratios of second-order susceptibilities like $χ_{11}^{BQ}/χ_2^B$ and $χ_{11}^{BS}/χ_2^B$ are sensitive only to the baryon spectrum, while fourth-to-second order ratios like $χ_4^B/χ_2^B$, $χ_{31}^{BS}/χ_{11}^{B…
In the current work, we study the influence of a finite volume on $2+1$ $SU(3)$ Polyakov Quark-Meson model (PQM) order parameters, (fluctuations) correlations of conserved charges and the quark-hadron phase boundary. Our study of the PQM model order parameters and the (fluctuations) correlations of conserved charges indicates a sizable shift of the quark-hadron phase boundary to higher values of baryon chemical potential ($μ_{B}$) and temperature ($T$) for decreasing the system volume. The detailed study of such effect could have important implications for the extraction of the (fluctuations) …
The quantum van der Waals (QvdW) extension of the ideal hadron resonance gas (HRG) model which includes the attractive and repulsive interactions between baryons -- the QvdW-HRG model -- is applied to study the behavior of the baryon number related susceptibilities in the crossover temperature region. Inclusion of the QvdW interactions leads to a qualitatively different behavior of susceptibilities, in many cases resembling lattice QCD simulations. It is shown that for some observables, in particular for $χ_{11}^{BQ} / χ_2^B$, effects of the QvdW interactions essentially cancel out. It is foun…
Net-baryon, net-charge and net-strangeness number fluctuations in high energy heavy-ion collisions are discussed within the framework of a hadron resonance gas (HRG) model. Ratios of the conserved number susceptibilities calculated in HRG are being compared to the corresponding experimental measurements to extract information about the freeze-out condition and the phase structure of systems with strong interactions. We emphasize the importance of considering the actual experimental acceptances in terms of kinematics (pseudorapidity ($η$) and transverse momentum ($p_{T}$)), the detected charge …
We study time evolution of critical fluctuations of conserved charges near the QCD critical point in the context of relativistic heavy ion collisions. A stochastic diffusion equation is employed in order to describe the diffusion property of the critical fluctuation arising from the coupling of the order parameter field to conserved charges. We show that the diffusion property gives rise to a possibility of probing the early time fluctuations through the rapidity window dependence of the second-order cumulant and correlation function of conserved charges. It is pointed out that their non-monot…
We propose to describe the time evolution of quasi-stationary fluctuations near QCD critical point by a system of stochastic Boltzmann-Langevin-Vlasov-type equations. We derive the equations and study the system analytically in the linearized regime. Known results for equilibrium stationary fluctuations as well as the critical scaling of diffusion coefficient are reproduced. We apply the approach to the long-standing question of the fate of the critical point fluctuations during the hadronic rescattering stage of the heavy-ion collision after chemical freezeout. We find that if conserved parti…
We present results from lattice QCD calculations for $2^{nd}$ and $4^{th}$ order cumulants of conserved charge fluctuations and correlations, and compare these with various HRG model calculations. We show that differences between HRG and QCD calculations already show up in the second order cumulants close to the pseudo-critical temperature for the chiral transition in (2+1)-flavor QCD and quickly grow large at higher temperatures. We also show that QCD results for strangeness fluctuations are enhanced over HRG model calculations which are based only on particles listed in the Particle Data Gro…
The chemical freeze-out parameters in central nucleus-nucleus collisions are extracted consistently from hadron yield data within the quantum van der Waals (QvdW) hadron resonance gas model. The beam energy dependences for skewness and kurtosis of net baryon, net electric, and net strangeness charges are predicted. The QvdW interactions in asymmetric matter, $Q/B \neq 0.5$, between (anti)baryons yield a non-congruent liquid-gas phase transition, together with a nuclear critical point (CP) with critical temperature of $T_c=19.5$ MeV. The nuclear CP yields the collision energy dependence of the …
Above a pseudocritical temperature of chiral symmetry restoration T_c the energy and the pressure are very far from the quark-gluon-plasma limit (i.e. ideal gas of free quarks and gluons). At the same time very soon above T_c fluctuations of conserved charges behave as if quarks were free particles. Within the T_c - 3T_c interval a chiral spin symmetry emerges in QCD which is not consistent with free quarks and suggests that degrees of freedom are chirally symmetric quarks bound into the color-singlet objects by the chromoelectric field. Here we analyse temporal and spatial correlators in this…
In a hadronic gas with three conserved charges (electric charge, baryon number, and strangeness) we employ the hadron resonance gas model to compute both diagonal and off-diagonal susceptibilities. We model the effect of chemical freeze-out in two ways: one in which all particle numbers are conserved below the chemical freeze-out temperature and one which takes into account resonance decays. We then briefly discuss possible implications these results may have on two active areas of research, hydrodynamic fluctuations and the search for the QCD critical point.
We study the net-charge fluctuations, $D$-measure variable, in high energy heavy-ion collisions in heavy-ion jet interaction generator (HIJING), ultrarelativistic quantum molecular dynamics (UrQMD) and hadron resonance gas (HRG) models for various center-of-mass energies (\sqsn). The effect of kinematic acceptance and resonance decay, in the pseudorapidity acceptance interval ($Δη$) and lower transverse momentum ($p_{T}^{min}$) threshold, on fluctuation measures are discussed. A strong dependence of $D$ with the $Δη$ in HIJING and UrQMD models is observed as opposed to results obtained from th…
Fluctuations of conserved quantities, such as baryon, electric charge and strangeness number, are sensitive observables in relativistic heavy-ion collisions to probe the QCD phase transition and search for the QCD critical point. In this paper, we review the experimental measurements of the cumulants (up to fourth order) of event-by-event net-proton (proxy for net-baryon), net-charge and net-kaon (proxy for net-strangeness) multiplicity distributions in Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=7.7, 11.5, 14.5, 19.6, 27, 39, 62.4, 200$ GeV from the first phase of beam energy scan program at the Relat…
We construct net baryon number and strangeness susceptibilities as well as correlations between electric charge and strangeness from experimental data of the ALICE Collaboration at the CERN LHC. The data were taken in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$=2.76 TeV. The resulting fluctuations and correlations are consistent with Lattice QCD results at the chiral crossover pseudocritical temperature $T_c\simeq 155$ MeV. This agreement lends strong support to the assumption that the fireball created in these collisions is of thermal origin and exhibits characteristic properties expected in QCD at t…
At top collider energies where baryon stopping is negligible, the initial state of heavy ion collisions is overall charge neutral and predominantly composed of gluons. Nevertheless, there can also be significant local fluctuations of the baryon number, strangeness, and electric charge densities about zero, perturbatively corresponding to the production of quark/antiquark pairs. These previously ignored local charge fluctuations can permit the study of charge diffusion in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), even at top collider energies. In this paper we present a new model denoted ICCING (Initial Co…
We present the first lattice QCD results of the second order fluctuations of and correlations among net baryon number, electric charge and strangeness in (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD in the presence of a background magnetic field with physical pion mass $m_π=135$ MeV. To mimic the magnetic field strength produced in the early stage of heavy-ion collision experiments we use 6 different values of the magnetic field strength up to $ \sim $10$m_π^2$. We find that the correlations between baryon number and electric charge along the transition line are substantially affected by magnetic fields in the cu…
We investigate the effect of the global charge conservation on the cumulants of conserved charges observed in relativistic heavy ion collisions in a finite rapidity window, $Δη$, with a special emphasis on the time evolution of fluctuations in the hadronic medium. It is argued that the experimental result of the net-electric charge fluctuation observed by ALICE does not receive effects from the global charge conservation, because of the finite diffusion distance of charged particles in the hadronic stage. We emphasize that the magnitude of the effect of the global charge conservation can be es…
Dissipative processes in relativistic fluids are known to be important in the analyses of the hot QCD matter created in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. In this work, I consider dissipative corrections to energy and conserved charge densities, which are conventionally assumed to be vanishing but could be finite. Causal dissipative hydrodynamics is formulated in the presence of those dissipative currents. The relation between hydrodynamic stability and transport coefficients is discussed. I then study their phenomenological consequences on the observables of heavy-ion collisions in numerical s…
We construct net baryon number and strangeness susceptibilities as well as correlations between electric charge, strangeness and baryon number from experimental data on the particle production yields at midrapidity of the ALICE Collaboration at CERN. The data were taken in central Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}$~=~2.76~TeV and cover one unit of rapidity. We show that the resulting fluctuations and correlations are consistent with Lattice QCD results at the chiral crossover pseudocritical temperature $T_{c} \simeq$ 155 MeV. This agreement lends strong support to the assumption that the …
In this paper we discuss the interacting hadron resonance gas model in presence of a constant external magnetic field. The short range repulsive interaction between hadrons are accounted through van der Waals excluded volume correction to the ideal gas pressure. Here we take the sizes of hadrons as $r_π$ (pion radius) $= 0$ fm, $r_K$ (kaon radius) $= 0.35$ fm, $r_m$ (all other meson radii) $= 0.3$ fm and $r_b$ (baryon radii) $= 0.5$ fm. We analyse the effect of uniform background magnetic field on the thermodynamic properties of interacting hadron gas. We especially discuss the effect of inter…
The study of multiplicity distributions of identified particles in terms of their higher moments is at the focus of contemporary experimental and theoretical studies. In a thermalized system, combinations of these moments are directly related to the Equation of State (EoS). The ultimate goal of the experimental measurements in relativistic nuclear collisions is, by systematic comparison to QCD and QCD inspired calculations, to probe the dynamics of genuine phase transitions between a hadron gas and the quark-gluon plasma. However, the comparison between experiment and theory is far from trivia…
Fluctuations of conserved quantities in heavy-ion collisions are used to probe the phase transition and the QCD critical point for the strongly interacting hot and dense nuclear matter. The STAR experiment has carried out moment analysis of net-proton (proxy for net-baryon (B)), net-kaon (proxy for net-strangeness (S)), and net-charge (Q). These measurements are important for understanding the quantum chromodynamics phase diagram. We present the analysis techniques used in the moment analysis by the STAR experiment and discuss the moments of net-proton and net-charge distributions from the fir…
We present for the first time quantitative results for the coupled dynamics of second order fluctuations in the three conserved charges of QCD based on stochastic diffusion equations for a Bjorken-type expanding hadronic medium.
Using high-statistics datasets generated in (2+1)-flavor QCD calculations at finite temperature we construct estimators for the radius of convergence from an eighth order series expansion of the pressure as well as the number density. We show that the estimator for pressure and number density will be identical in the asymptotic limit. In the vicinity of the pseudo-critical temperature, $T_{pc}\simeq 156.5$~MeV, we find the estimator of the radius of convergence to be $μ_B/T \gtrsim\ 3$ for strangeness-neutral matter. We also present results for the pole structure of the Padé approximants for t…
We report the higher order cumulants and their ratios for baryon, charge and strangeness multiplicity in canonical and grand-canonical ensembles in ideal thermal model including all the resonances. When the number of conserved quanta is small, an explicit treatment of these conserved charges is required, which leads to a canonical description of the system and the fluctuations are significantly different from the grand canonical ensemble. Cumulant ratios of total charge and net-charge multiplicity as a function of collision energies are also compared in grand canonical ensemble.
Using high statistics datasets generated in (2+1)-flavor QCD calculations at finite temperature we present results for low order cumulants of net baryon-number fluctuations at non-zero values of the baryon chemical potential. We calculate Taylor expansions for the pressure (zeroth order cumulant), net baryon-number density (first order cumulant) and the variance of the distribution on net-baryon number fluctuations (second order cumulant). We obtain series expansions from an eighth order expansion of the pressure and compare these to diagonal Padé approximants. This allows us to estimate the r…
We study the critical properties of net-baryon-number fluctuations at the chiral restoration transition in a medium at finite temperature and net baryon density. The chiral dynamics of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is modeled by the Polykov-loop extended Quark-Meson Lagrangian, that includes the coupling of quarks to vector meson and temporal gauge fields. The Functional Renormalization Group is employed to properly account for the $O(4)$ criticality at the phase boundary. We focus on the properties and systematics of ratios of the net-baryon-number cumulants $χ_B^n$, for ${1\leq n\leq 6}$, nea…
The Poisson-liked statistical fluctuations, which are caused by the finite number of produced particles, are firstly estimated for the cumulants of conserved charges, i.e., the cumulants of net-baryon, net-electric charge, and net-strangeness. They turn out to be the same as those baselines derived from Hadron Resonance Gas (HRG) model. The energy and centrality dependence of net-proton cumulants at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) are demonstrated to be mainly caused by statistical fluctuations. Subtracting the statistical fluctuations, the dynamical kurtosis of net- and total-proto…
We introduce a fast and simple method of computing cumulants of net-proton or net-charge fluctuations in event-by-event hydrodynamic simulations of heavy-ion collisions. One evaluates the mean numbers of particles in every hydrodynamic event. Cumulants are then expressed as a function of these mean numbers. We implement the corrections due to global conservation laws. The method is tested using ideal hydrodynamic simulations of Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200$ AGeV with the NeXSPheRIO code. Results are in good agreement with experimental data on net-proton and net-charge fluctuations by…
The third moments of conserved charges, the baryon and electric charge numbers, and energy, as well as their mixed moments, carry more information on the state around the QCD phase boundary than previously proposed fluctuation observables and higher order moments. In particular, their signs give plenty of information on the location of the state created in relativistic heavy ion collisions in the temperature and baryon chemical potential plane. We demonstrate this with an effective model.
I summarize recent results from lattice QCD on a few selected topics which are of interest to the heavy-ion physics community. Special emphasis is placed upon observables related to fluctuations of conserved charges and their connection to event-by-event fluctuations in heavy-ion collision experiments.