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Onset of deconfinement and search for the critical point of strongly interacting matter at CERN SPS energies
The exploration of the QCD phase diagram particularly the search for a phase transition from hadronic to partonic degrees of freedom and possibly a critical endpoint, is one of the most challenging tasks in present heavy-ion physics. As observed by the NA49 experiment, several hadronic observables i...
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Lenguaje: | eng |
Publicado: |
2012
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://dx.doi.org/10.22323/1.174.0422 http://cds.cern.ch/record/1496792 |
Sumario: | The exploration of the QCD phase diagram particularly the search for a phase transition from hadronic to partonic degrees of freedom and possibly a critical endpoint, is one of the most challenging tasks in present heavy-ion physics. As observed by the NA49 experiment, several hadronic observables in central Pb+Pb collisions at the CERN SPS show qualitative changes in their energy dependence. These features are not observed in elementary interactions and indicate the onset of a phase transition in the SPS energy range. The existence of a critical point is expected to result in the increase of event-by-event fluctuations of various hadronic observables provided that the freeze-out of the measured hadrons occurs close to its location in the phase diagram and the evolution of the final hadron phase does not erase the fluctuations signals. A selection of NA49 results on di-pion and proton intermittency from the scan of the phase diagram will be discussed. |
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