The role of the local conservation laws in fluctuations of conserved charges

TL;DR

This paper quantitatively analyzes how local baryon number conservation affects fluctuations of conserved charges, comparing theoretical predictions with experimental data from CERN ALICE, and finds its impact on second cumulants to be minimal.

Contribution

It provides the first quantitative assessment of baryon-anti-baryon correlations due to local conservation laws in high-energy collisions.

Findings

Local baryon number conservation has a small effect on second cumulants.

Theoretical results are consistent with CERN ALICE measurements.

Highlights the importance of conservation laws in interpreting fluctuation data.

Abstract

In this report we present the first quantitative determination of the correlations between baryons and anti-baryons induced by local baryon number conservation. This is important in view of the many experimental studies aiming at probing the phase structure of strongly interacting matter. We confront our results with the recent measurements of net-proton fluctuations reported by the CERN ALICE experiment. The role of local baryon number conservation is found to be small on the level of second cumulants.