Charge transfer fluctuations as a signal for quark-gluon plasma

Abstract

In this work, the charge transfer fluctuation that was previously used for pp collisions is proposed for relativistic heavy-ion collisions as a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) probe. We propose the appearance of a local minimum at midrapidity for the charge transfer fluctuation as a signal for a QGP. Within a two-component neutral cluster model, we demonstrate that the charge transfer fluctuation can detect the presence of a QGP as well as the size of the QGP in the rapidity space. We also show that the forward-backward correlation of multiplicity can be a similarly good measure of the presence of a QGP. Further, we show that the previously proposed net charge fluctuation is sensitive to the existence of the second phase only if the QGP phase occupies a large portion of the available rapidity space.