Baryon number, strangeness and electric charge fluctuations at zero and non-zero chemical potential

TL;DR

This study uses lattice QCD calculations to analyze fluctuations of baryon number, strangeness, and electric charge at various temperatures and chemical potentials, providing insights into the QCD phase transition and potential critical points.

Contribution

It presents the first lattice QCD results on fluctuations at non-zero density using Taylor expansions, indicating possible critical behavior in the QCD phase diagram.

Findings

Large fluctuations near the transition temperature at zero chemical potential.

Non-monotonic behavior of the Taylor series convergence radius suggests a critical end-point.

Results are relevant for conditions at RHIC and LHC.

Abstract

We present results on baryon number, strangeness and electric charge fluctuations in QCD at non-zero density and temperature obtained from lattice calculations with almost physical quark masses. At vanishing chemical potential, i.e. under conditions almost realized at RHIC and the LHC, quartic fluctuations of net baryon number and strangeness are large in a narrow temperature interval characterizing the transition region from the low to the high temperature phase. Our results are based on Taylor expansions in light and strange quark chemical potentials, i.e. we rigorously compute corrections to bulk thermodynamic quantities at non vanishing chemical potential, by performing a Taylor expansion in $\mu/T$. We find non-monotonic behavior for the radius of convergence of this series, which could be a hint for a critical end-point in the ($T,\mu$)-plane.