Energy dependence of intermittency for charged hadrons in Au+Au collisions at RHIC
M. I. Abdulhamid, B. E. Aboona, J. Adam, L. Adamczyk, J. R. Adams, I. Aggarwal, M. M. Aggarwal, Z. Ahammed, D. M. Anderson, E. C. Aschenauer, S. Aslam, J. Atchison, V. Bairathi, W. Baker, J. Ball, K. N. Barish, R. Bellwied, P. Bhagat, A. Bhasin, S. Bhatta, J. Bielčík, J. Bielčíková, J. D. Brandenburg, X. Z. Cai, H. Caines, M. Calderon De La Barca Sanchez, D. Cebra, J. Ceska, I. Chakaberia, P. Chaloupka, B. K. Chan, Z. Chang, A. Chatterjee, D. Chen, J. Chen, J.H. Chen, Z. Chen, J. Cheng, Y. Cheng, S. Choudhury, W. Christie, X. Chu, H. J. Crawford, M. Csanád, G. Dale-Gau, Anwesha Das, M. Daugherity, I. M. Deppner, A. Dhamija, L. Di Carlo, P. Dixit, X. Dong, J. L. Drachenberg, E. Duckworth, J. C. Dunlop, J. Engelage, G. Eppley, S. Esumi, O. Evdokimov, A. Ewigleben, O. Eyser, R. Fatemi, S. Fazio, C. Feng, Y. Feng, E. Finch, Y. Fisyak, F. Flor, C. Fu, C. A. Gagliardi, T. Galatyuk, Tong Gao, F. J. M. Geurts, N. Ghimire, S. M. Gibson, K. Gopal, X. Gou, D. Grosnick, A. Gupta, W. Guryn, A. Hamed, Y. Han, S. Harabasz, M. D. Harasty, J. W. Harris, H. Harrison-Smith, W. He, X. H. He, Y. He, N. Herrmann, L. Holub, C. Hu, Q. Hu, Y. Hu, H. Huang, H. Z. Huang, S. Huang, T. Huang, Xinhui Huang, Y. Huang
Abstract
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 sNN = 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 sNN = 27 GeV. The physics implications on the QCD phase structure are discussed.