Effects of Nuclear Potential on the Cumulants of Net-Proton and Net-Baryon Multiplicity Distributions in Au+Au Collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\text{NN}}} = 5\,\text{GeV}$

TL;DR

This study investigates how nuclear mean field potential and equation of state softening influence net-proton and net-baryon fluctuation cumulants in Au+Au collisions at 5 GeV, revealing their limited role in observed fluctuation enhancements.

Contribution

The paper provides a detailed analysis of the impact of mean field potential and EoS softening on fluctuation cumulants using a microscopic transport model, highlighting their limited effect on experimental observations.

Findings

Mean field potential and EoS softening significantly affect rapidity and multiplicity distributions.

Cumulant ratios show suppression due to baryon number conservation.

These effects are unlikely to explain the fluctuation enhancement at 7.7 GeV.

Abstract

We analyze the rapidity and transverse momentum dependence for the cumulants of the net-proton and net-baryon distributions in Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\text{NN}}} = 5\,\text{GeV}$ with a microscopic hadronic transport (JAM) model. To study the effects of mean field potential and softening of equation of state (EoS) on the fluctuations of net-proton (baryon) in heavy-ion collisions, the calculations are performed with two different modes. The softening of EoS is realized in the model by implementing the attractive orbit in the two-body scattering to introduce a reduction pressure of the system. By comparing the results from the two modes with the results from default cascade, we find the mean field potential and softening of EoS have strong impacts on the rapidity distributions ($\text{d}N/\text{d}y$) and the shape of the net-proton (baryon) multiplicity distributions. The net-proton (baryon) cumulants and their ratios calculated from all of the three modes are with similar trends and show significant suppression with respect to unity, which can be explained by the presence of baryon number conservations. It indicates that the effects of mean field potential and softening of EoS might be not the ingredients that are responsible to the observed strong enhancement in the most central Au+Au collisions at 7.7 GeV measured by the STAR experiment at RHIC.