2024/01/18 by Lizhu Chen, Chen, Lizhu, Ye-Yin Zhao +9
Computer Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Bayesian Methods and Mixture Models #FOS: Physical sciences #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Nuclear Experiment (nucl-ex) #Nuclear Theory (nucl-th) #Stochastic processes and statistical mechanics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2401.09745
openalex publication_date 2024/01/18 · openalex created_date 2024/01/20 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Hyper-order cumulants C5/C1 and C6/C2 of net-baryon distributions are anticipated to offer crucial insights into the phase transition from quark-gluon plasma to hadronic matter in heavy-ion collisions. However, the accuracy of C5 and C6 is highly contingent on the fine shape of the distribution's tail, the detectable range of which could be essentially truncated by low statistics. In this paper, we use the fast Skellam-based simulations, as well as the Ultrarelativistic Quantum Molecular Dynamics model, to assess the impact of limited statistics on the measurements of C5/C1 and C6/C2 of net-proton distributions at lower RHIC energies. Both ratios decrease from the unity baseline as we reduce statistics, and could even turn negative without a pertinent physics mechanism. By incorporating statistics akin to experimental data, we can replicate the net-proton C5/C1 and C6/C2 values comparable to the corresponding measurements for Au+Au collisions at √sNN = 7.7, 11.5 and 14.5 GeV. Our findings underscore a caveat to the interpretation of the observed beam energy dependence of hyper-order cumulants.