# Effects of fluctuations and color-neutrality in a finite volume

## TL;DR

This paper models strongly interacting matter in finite volumes, showing how fluctuations and color-neutrality influence phase behavior, critical signatures, and observable susceptibilities, with implications for interpreting experimental collider data.

## Contribution

It introduces a schematic model that incorporates finite volume effects, fluctuations, and color-neutrality, revealing their impact on phase transition signatures and susceptibilities in strongly interacting matter.

## Key findings

- Fluctuations cause both phases to contribute in finite systems.
- Color-neutrality shifts the effective critical temperature with volume.
- Observable susceptibilities depend strongly on system size.

## Abstract

We investigate properties of strongly interacting matter in a schematic model, based on the combined degrees of freedom of a non-interacting hadronic phase and a non-interacting deconfined phase. It is found that in a finite system both phases contribute to the thermodynamic state due to fluctuations and that signatures of critical behviour like the divergence of statistical quantities are damped. The constraint of color-neutrality leads to a volume-dependent shift of the effective critical temperature, which follows a scaling law, independent of the baryochemical potential. According to the model, observable baryon-number susceptibilities at a given $T$ and $\mu_B$ strongly depend on the system size. Finally, we compare hadronization conditions from the model with hadrochemical fits to experimental collider data, where a qualitatively similar system size dependence is extracted.