Evolutionary intermittency and the QCD critical point

TL;DR

This paper models the dynamics of the critical isoscalar condensate in heavy-ion collisions, demonstrating that critical fluctuations can be detected in pion distributions through intermittency analysis, providing a new observable for QCD critical point searches.

Contribution

It introduces a simplified model linking sigma and pions to identify critical fluctuation signatures in particle data, incorporating dynamical effects in intermittency analysis.

Findings

Critical fluctuations leave detectable traces in sigma and pion distributions.

Intermittency indices can serve as observables for criticality in experiments.

Survival of critical signatures at the pion level despite dynamical effects.

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of the critical isoscalar condensate, formed during heavy-ion collisions. Our analysis is based on a simplified model where the sigma and the pions are the only degrees of freedom. In field description, both in physical and momentum space, we find that the freeze-out profile presents a structure which reveals clear traces of the critical fluctuations in the sigma-component. In particle representation, using Monte-Carlo simulations and factorial moment analysis, we show that signatures of the initial criticality survive at the detected pions. We propose the distribution of suitably defined intermittency indices, incorporating dynamical effects due to sigma-pion interaction, as the basic observable for the exploration of critical fluctuations in heavy-ion collision experiments.