# Higher moments of net-proton multiplicity distributions in a heavy-ion event pile-up scenario

## TL;DR

This study investigates how residual event pile-up in high-luminosity heavy-ion collisions can distort net-proton multiplicity moments, potentially affecting the search for the QCD critical point.

## Contribution

It demonstrates the impact of small fractions of pile-up events on net-proton multiplicity moments and emphasizes the need for careful pile-up estimation in critical point analyses.

## Key findings

- Pile-up significantly alters cumulants and their ratios at lower energies.
- Residual pile-up can mimic signals of critical fluctuations.
- Event-by-event net-proton distribution moments are sensitive to pile-up effects.

## Abstract

High-luminosity modern accelerators, like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at BNL and Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, inherently have event pile-up scenarios which significantly contribute to physics events as a background. While state-of-the-art tracking algorithms and detector concepts take care of these event pile-up scenarios, several offline analytical techniques are used to remove such events from the physics analysis. It is still difficult to identify the remaining pile-up events in an event sample for physics analysis. Since the fraction of these events is significantly small, it may not be as serious of an issue for other analysis as it would be for an event-by-event analysis. Particularly, when the characteristics of the multiplicity distribution are observable, one needs to be very careful. In the present work, we demonstrate how a small fraction of residual pile-up events can change the moments and their ratios of an event-by-event net-proton multiplicity distribution, which are sensitive to the dynamical fluctuations due to the QCD critical point. For this study we assume that the individual event-by-event proton and antiproton multiplicity distributions follow Poisson, negative binomial or binomial distributions. We observe a significant effect in cumulants and their ratios of net-proton multiplicity distributions due to pile-up events, particularly at lower energies. It might be crucial to estimate the fraction of pile-up events in the data sample while interpreting the experimental observable for the critical point.