A possible evidence of observation of two mixed phases in nuclear collisions

TL;DR

This paper presents evidence of two mixed phases in nuclear collisions through irregularities in thermodynamic observables and data analysis, suggesting the formation of quark-gluon plasma at specific energies.

Contribution

It introduces the observation of two correlated quasi-plateaus in collision data and links them to mixed phase formation using advanced models and meta-analysis of event generators.

Findings

Identification of two sets of quasi-plateaus at specific energies.

Evidence for mixed phase formation at these energies.

Comparison of data description quality supports mixed phase regions.

Abstract

Using an advanced version of the hadron resonance gas model we have found several remarkable irregularities at chemical freeze-out. The most prominent of them are two sets of highly correlated quasi-plateaus in the collision energy dependence of the entropy per baryon, total pion number per baryon, and thermal pion number per baryon which we found at center of mass energies 3.6-4.9 GeV and 7.6-10 GeV. The low energy set of quasi-plateaus was predicted a long time ago. On the basis of the generalized shock-adiabat model we demonstrate that the low energy correlated quasi-plateaus give evidence for the anomalous thermodynamic properties of the mixed phase at its boundary to the quark-gluon plasma. The question is whether the high energy correlated quasi-plateaus are also related to some kind of mixed phase. In order to answer this question we employ the results of a systematic meta-analysis of the quality of data description of 10 existing event generators of nucleus-nucleus collisions in the range of center of mass collision energies from 3.1 GeV to 17.3 GeV. These generators are divided into two groups: the first group includes the generators which account for the quark-gluon plasma formation during nuclear collisions, while the second group includes the generators which do not assume the quark-gluon plasma formation in such collisions. Comparing the quality of data description of more than a hundred of different data sets of strange hadrons by these two groups of generators, we find two regions of the equal quality of data description which are located at the center of mass collision energies 4.3-4.9 GeV and 10.-13.5 GeV. These two regions of equal quality of data description we interpret as regions of the hadron-quark-gluon mixed phase formation.