Anatomy of critical fluctuations in hadronic matter

Abstract

Critical phenomena in phase transitions of strongly interacting matter, governed by quantum chromodynamics, are inherently encoded in the fluctuations of conserved charges. In this work, we study the net-baryon number density fluctuations, including the lowest-lying nucleon and the baryonic resonance Δ(1232), based on the parity doublet model in the mean-field approximation. We focus on the qualitative features of the second-order susceptibility of the net-baryon number density in dense hadronic matter and how the inclusion of Δ(1232) affects it. We demonstrate that the fluctuations of the individual baryons do not necessarily reflect the total net-baryon number fluctuations at finite density, due to the nontrivial correlations between different particle species. Our results highlight the role of baryonic correlations in the interpretation of data from heavy ion collision experiments. Published by the American Physical Society 2024