arXiv subjects

Anar Rustamov

Publications and source records attributed to Anar Rustamov.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Baryon fluctuation signatures of the onset of deconfinement

An anomalous collision-energy dependence of proton number fluctuations is predicted as a consequence of the onset of deconfinement in heavy-ion collisions at the center of mass energy of the nucleon pair of about 10 GeV. The effect arises from changes in the effective degrees of freedom between confined and deconfined matter. This may provide a natural explanation of the recent beam-energy-scan results on proton number fluctuations at the BNL RHIC and offers a consistent interpretation of data from the CERN SPS and RHIC experiments in terms of the onset of deconfinement.

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arXiv2026

The phase structure of QCD: Fluctuations and Correlations

The strong interaction - governed by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) - shapes the structure of the visible universe. At about 10 $\mu$s after the big bang, the primordial matter made up of quarks and gluons plus leptons, photons and neutrinos, the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), became cool enough to create, in a phase transition, the protons and neutrons of ordinary matter, along with other strongly interacting unstable hadrons. This phase transition was predicted within the framework of QCD and has been studied in accelerator laboratories world-wide since about 40 years. This review will explore recent breakthroughs in the study of the QCD phase diagram. We will highlight measurements of particle production and fluctuations, and compare them to theoretical predictions. We summarize our current understanding of the QCD structure and outline future experimental opportunities with high energy nuclear collisions at fixed-target and collider facilities world-wide.

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arXiv2025

Baselines for Abelian Charge Fluctuations in Nuclear Collisions:Theory and Comparison with Experimental Data

We investigate fluctuations in the canonical ensemble of an Abelian charge, such as baryon number. Our focus is on cumulants and factorial cumulants of baryon and antibaryon multiplicity distributions, including their sum and difference, in both the full phase space and subsystems. In particular, we establish a correlation between net-baryon number fluctuations within a subsystem, which is pertinent for fluctuation analyses in nucleus-nucleus collisions, and fluctuations of baryon and antibaryon numbers in the total system. We derive analytical expressions for factorial cumulants of arbitrary order and present concise results in terms of the cumulants of the total baryon number. To account for dynamics beyond global conservation, we introduce local attractive and repulsive multi-particle interactions within a phenomenological framework. A comparison of calculated and generated cumulants with STAR and HADES data indicates that multiparticle interactions play a decisive role in the description of observed fluctuation patterns. At high collision energies, the data are well-reproduced by incorporating repulsive two-proton interactions, while at lower energies, attractive three-particle interactions become essential. Furthermore, our framework facilitates realistic event generation, enabling a direct comparison with experimental measurements.

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arXiv2024

Fuzzy logic for reconstructing arbitrary moments of multiplicity distributions

The Identity Method is a statistical technique developed to reconstruct moments of multiplicity distributions of particles produced in high-energy nuclear collisions. The method leverages principles from fuzzy logic, allowing for a more nuanced representation of particle identification by assigning degrees of membership to different particle types based on detector signals. In this contribution, a new framework, based on a multivariate moment generation function, is developed that allows the derivation of the formulas used in the Identity Method in a more robust way. Moreover, within the introduced framework, the Identity Method is easily extended to cope with arbitrarily higher-order moments. The techniques developed here offer significant potential for improving the accuracy of multiplicity distribution analyses in high-energy nuclear collisions. While the primary focus of the work presented is on applications in high-energy particle and nuclear physics, it can also be applied in other areas where signal identification is probabilistic and data are noisy, such as in medical imaging, remote sensing, and various other fields of experimental science.

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arXiv2024

Controlling volume fluctuations for studies of critical phenomena in nuclear collisions

We generalize and extend the recently proposed method to account for contributions of system size (or volume/participant) fluctuations to the experimentally measured moments of particle multiplicity distributions. We find that in the general case there are additional biases which are not directly accessible to experiment. These biases are, however, parametrically suppressed if the multiplicity of the particles of interest is small compared to the total charged-particle multiplicity, e.g., in the case of proton number fluctuations at top RHIC and LHC energies. They are also small if the multiplicity distribution of charged particles per wounded nucleon is close to the Poissonian limit, which is the case at low energy nuclear collisions, e.g., at GSI/SIS18. We further find that mixed events are not necessarily needed to extract the correction for volume fluctuations, albeit it can help if event statistics is small, which is typically the case for reconstructing the higher-order cumulants. We provide the formulas to correct pure and mixed cumulants of particle multiplicity distributions up to any order together with their associated biases.

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arXiv2023

The imprint of conservation laws on correlated particle production

The study of event-by-event fluctuations of net-baryon number in a subspace of full phase space is a promising direction for deciphering the structure of strongly interacting matter created in head-on collisions of relativistic heavy nuclei. Such fluctuations are generally suppressed by exact baryon number conservation. Moreover, the suppression is stronger if baryon number is conserved locally. In this report we present a conceptually new approach to quantify correlations in rapidity space between baryon-antibaryon, baryon-baryon, and antibaryon-antibaryon pairs and demonstrate their impact on net-baryon number fluctuations. For the special case of Gaussian rapidity distributions, we use the Cholesky factorization of the covariance matrix, while the general case is introduced by exploiting the well-known Metropolis and Simulated Annealing methods. The approach is based on the use of the canonical ensemble of statistical mechanics for baryon number and can be applied to study correlations between baryons as well as strange and/or charm hadrons. It can also be applied to describe relativistic nuclear collisions leading to the production of multi-particle final states. One application of our method is the search for formation of proton clusters at low collision energies emerging as a harbinger of the anticipated first-order chiral phase transition. In a first step, the results obtained are compared to the recent measurements from the CERN ALICE collaboration. Such investigations are key to explore the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter and baryon production mechanisms at energy scales from several GeV to several TeV.

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arXiv2022

50 Years of Quantum Chromodynamics

This paper presents a comprehensive review of both the theory and experimental successes of Quantum Chromodynamics, starting with its emergence as a well defined theory in 1972-73 and following developments and results up to the present day. Topics include a review of the earliest theoretical and experimental foundations; the fundamental constants of QCD; an introductory discussion of lattice QCD, the only known method for obtaining exact predictions from QCD; methods for approximating QCD, with special focus on effective field theories; QCD under extreme conditions; measurements and predictions of meson and baryon states; a special discussion of the structure of the nucleon; techniques for study of QCD at high energy, including treatment of jets and showers; measurements at colliders; weak decays and quark mixing; and a section on the future, which discusses new experimental facilities or upgrades currently funded. The paper is intended to provide a broad background for Ph.D. students and postdocs starting their career. Some contributions include personal accounts of how the ideas or experiments were developed.

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arXiv2022

A model-free procedure to correct for volume fluctuations in E-by-E analyses of particle multiplicities

We develop an innovative and unbiased procedure, based on event mixing, to account for unavoidable contributions from volume (or system size) fluctuations to experimentally measured moments of particle multiplicity distributions produced in relativistic nuclear collisions. Within the wounded-nucleon model they are characterized by fluctuations of the number of wounded nucleons, the latter usually referred to as participants. For the first time we extract participant fluctuations directly from the data used for the fluctuation analysis, i.e., without involving model calculations. To achieve this we constructed a dedicated event-mixing algorithm that eliminates all possible correlations between produced particles while preserving the volume fluctuations. The procedure provides direct access to the cumulants of wounded-nucleon distributions, which can be used to account for non-critical contributions to the experimentally measured cumulants of multiplicity distributions.

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arXiv2022

QCD under extreme conditions

In nucleus-nucleus collisions at relativistic energies a new kind of matter is created, the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). The phase diagram of such matter and the chemical freeze-out points will be presented in connection to the pseudo-critical temperature for the chiral cross over transition. The role of conserved charge fluctuations to give experimental access to the nature of the chiral phase transition will be summarized in terms of the relation to lattice QCD and the current experimental data. The QGP can be characterized as a nearly ideal liquid expanding hydrodynamically and the experimental data allow to extract transport parameters such as the bulk and shear viscosities. The energy loss of partons in the QGP probes the high parton density of the medium. The role of quarkonia and open charm hadrons as a probe of deconfinement and hadronization form the final topic.

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arXiv2022

Deciphering the phases of QCD matter with fluctuations and correlations of conserved charges

A review is given on recent experimental and theoretical/phenomenological developments regarding the phase structure of the strongly interacting matter. Specifically, evolution with the collision energy of net-proton number fluctuations as measured by several experiments are presented and their implications for the QCD phase diagram are outlined. In addition, theoretical calculations on correlations between conserved charges are presented and prospects for their experimental explorations are addressed.

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arXiv2020

Relativistic nuclear collisions: Establishing a non-critical baseline for fluctuation measurements

We study the influence of global baryon number conservation on the non-critical baseline of net baryon cumulants in heavy-ion collisions in a given acceptance, accounting for the asymmetry between the mean-numbers of baryons and antibaryons. We derive the probability distribution of net baryon number in a restricted phase space from the canonical partition function that incorporates exact conservation of baryon number in the full system. Furthermore, we provide tools to compute cumulants of any order from the generating function of uncorrelated baryons constrained by exact baryon number conservation. The results are applied to quantify the non-critical baseline for cumulants of net proton number fluctuations obtained in heavy-ion collisions by the STAR collaboration at different RHIC energies and by the ALICE collaboration at the LHC. Furthermore, volume fluctuations are added by a Monte Carlo procedure based on the centrality dependence of charged particle production as measured experimentally. Compared to the predictions based on the hadron resonance gas model or Skellam distribution a clear suppression of fluctuations is observed due to exact baryon-number conservation. The suppression increases with the order of the cumulant and towards lower collision energies. Predictions for net proton cumulants up to the eight order in heavy-ion collisions are given for experimentally accessible collision energies.

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arXiv2020

Overview of fluctuation and correlation measurements

One of the ultimate goals of nuclear collision experiments at high energy is to map the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter. A very challenging task is the determination of the QCD phase structure including the search for critical behavior and verification of the possible existence of a critical end point of a first order phase transition line. A promising tool to probe the presence of critical behavior is the study of fluctuations and correlations of conserved charges since, in a thermal system, these fluctuations are directly related to the equation of state (EoS) of the system under the study. In this report an overview is given of several experimental measurements on net-proton multiplicity distributions such as cumulants and multi-particle correlation functions.

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arXiv2019

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

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.

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arXiv2018

Experimental results on fluctuations of conserved charges confronted with predictions from canonical thermodynamics

The study of multiplicity distributions of identified particles in terms of their higher moments is at the focus of contemporary experimental and theoretical studies. In a thermalized system, combinations of these moments are directly related to the Equation of State (EoS). The ultimate goal of the experimental measurements in relativistic nuclear collisions is, by systematic comparison to QCD and QCD inspired calculations, to probe the dynamics of genuine phase transitions between a hadron gas and the quark-gluon plasma. However, the comparison between experiment and theory is far from trivial, because several non-dynamical effects on fluctuations need to be controlled prior to a meaningful comparison to theoretical predictions. In this report we present quantitative estimates for these non-dynamical contributions using the Canonical Ensemble (CE) formulation of statistical mechanics. Together with analytical formulas we provide also results from Monte Carlo (MC) simulations within the CE and compare our predictions with the corresponding measurements from the STAR experiment.

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arXiv2018

TIdentity module for the reconstruction of the moments of multiplicity distributions

In this report a new software module for the reconstruction of the moments of multiplicity distributions of identified particles, the TIdentity module, is presented. The module exploits the Identity Method, which allows to circumvent the issues of incomplete particle identifications caused by unavoidable overlapping particle identification signals. After demonstrating the performance of the module in a number of simulations, we provide a user's guide with a detailed description of its functionality. The module can be used in high energy nuclear interactions aiming at the determination of the moments of multiplicity distributions of identified particles.

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arXiv2017

Net-baryon fluctuations measured with ALICE at the CERN LHC

First experimental results are presented on event-by-event net-proton fluctuation measurements in Pb- Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV, recorded by the ALICE detector at the CERN LHC. The ALICE detector is well suited for such studies due to its excellent particle identification capabilities and large acceptance, which is crucial for fluctuation analysis. The studies are focussed on second order cumulants, but the analysis technique used is more general and will be applied, in the near future, also to higher order cumulants.

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arXiv2013

Recent results from NA61/SHINE and NA49

Preliminary results on particle spectra and fluctuations in inelastic p+p interactions measured by NA61/SHINE at the CERN SPS are presented and its future ion program is discussed. We also show results on the excitation functions of event-by-event particle ratio fluctuations in central Pb+Pb collisions from NA49 using a novel approach. We found a dependence of the results on phase space coverage which appears to explain the reported difference between measurements of NA49 and those of STAR in central Au+Au collisions.

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arXiv2012

The Horn, Kink and Step, Dale: from few GeV to few TeV

Rich experimental data have been collected in heavy-ion collisions at high energies to study the properties of strongly interacting matter. As the theory of strong interactions, QCD, predicts asymptotic freedom, the created matter at sufficiently high temperature and density will be dominated by a state of quasi-free quarks and gluons referred to as the Quark-Qluon Plasma (QGP). Experimental signals for the onset of the QGP creation (the onset of the deconfinement) have been predicted within the statistical model for the early stage of nucleus-nucleus collisions. In this model the existence of two different phases is assumed: confined mater and the QGP, as well as a first order phase transition between them. Until recently, these predictions were confirmed only by the NA49 experiment at the CERN SPS. In this report recent results from STAR at RHIC/BNL and from ALICE at LHC/CERN, related to the onset of deconfinement, will be compared to published results from NA49.

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