An Interesting Fluctuation…
occurred in my daily listing of new posts to nucl-ex and nucl-th. The word “fluctuations(s)” appeared 17 times in the titles and abstracts of papers posted. Among them are
- Probing the Quark-Gluon Phase Transition with Correlations and Fluctuations in Heavy Ion Collisions from the STAR Experiment , which somewhat counter-intuitively shows that forward-backward correlations increase with system size, with centrality and with center-of-mass energy.
- Multiplicity fluctuations and temperature fluctuations: Tsallis statistics as an “interpolator” between canonical (fixed temperature) and microcanonical (fixed energy) ensembles, leading to a connection between multiplicity fluctuations and fluctuations in transverse momenta.
- Fluctuations in relativistic heavy-ion collisions from the Glauber models: Fluctuations in the initial size from a Glauber Monte Carlo is the “source” for transverse momentum fluctuations (through hydrodynamics).
While not completely clear in my fast reading, it would seem that the latter two papers would predict different correlations between multiplicity and pT fluctuations- could this be used to discriminate between the suggested mechanisms?
Note: By my count, today there were at least 9 new papers of general interest to “QCD matter”. As far as i can tell, this is not driven by one looming conference proceedings deadline, but seems instead to be another (positive!) fluctuation.