Multiplicity fluctuation and correlation of mesons and baryons in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates the fluctuations and correlations of mesons and baryons produced in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the LHC, using a quark combination model to connect quark-level fluctuations to hadron observables.

Contribution

It introduces a statistical quark combination framework to derive hadron multiplicity correlations and includes quark number fluctuations and decay effects, providing a new approach to analyze heavy-ion collision data.

Findings

Calculated $ u_{dyn}$ for Kπ, pπ, and Kp pairs matches experimental data.

Revealed the impact of quark number fluctuations on hadron correlations.

Compared model predictions with experimental data and event generator simulations.

Abstract

We study the multiplicity fluctuation and correlation of identified mesons and baryons formed at the hadronization by the quark combination mechanism in the context of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Based on the statistical method of free quark combination, we derive the two-hadron multiplicity correlations such as meson-meson and meson-baryon correlations, and take the effects of quark number fluctuation at hadronization into account by a Taylor expansion method. After including the decay contributions, we calculate the dynamical fluctuation observable $\nu_{dyn}$ for $\text{K}\pi$, $p\pi$ and $\text{K}p$ pairs and discuss what underlying physics can be obtained by comparing with the data in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76$ TeV and the simulations from HIJING and AMPT event generators.