A Study of Fluctuations of Voids in Relativistic Ion-Ion Collisions

TL;DR

This study investigates event-by-event fluctuations of voids in relativistic ion-ion collisions, comparing experimental data with a transport model, and explores their potential to characterize phase transitions in hadronic matter.

Contribution

It introduces an analysis of void fluctuations in ion collisions and assesses their relation to phase transition properties, providing new insights into hadronic phase behavior.

Findings

Void fluctuations follow a power-law behavior useful for characterizing phase transitions.

The observed data do not support the occurrence of a second-order quark-hadron phase transition.

Scaling exponents from void fluctuations can differentiate between different phase transition scenarios.

Abstract

Event-by-event fluctuations (ebe) of hadronic patterns are investigated in terms of voids by analyzing the experimental data on 4.5, 14.5 and 60A GeV/c 16O-AgBr collisions. The findings are compared with the predictions of a multi-phase transport AMPT model. Dependence of voids on phase space bin width is examined in terms of two lowest moments of event-by-event fluctuations of voids, <Gq> and Sq. The findings reveal that scaling exponent estimated from the observed power-law behavior of the voids may be used to characterize the various properties of hadronic phase transition. The results also rule out occurrence of 2nd order quark-hadron phase transition at the projectile energies considered.