Detecting quark gluon plasma with charge transfer fluctuations

Abstract

We analyze the recently proposed charge transfer fluctuations within a finite pseudorapidity space. As the charge transfer fluctuation is a measure of the local charge correlation length, it is capable of detecting inhomogeneity in the hot and dense matter created by heavy-ion collisions. We predict that, going from peripheral to central collisions, the charge transfer fluctuations at mid-rapidity should decrease substantially while the charge transfer fluctuations at the edges of the observation window should decrease by a small amount. These are consequences of having a strongly inhomogeneous matter in which the quark gluon plasma component is concentrated around mid-rapidity. We also show how to constrain the values of the charge correlation lengths in both the hadronic phase and the quark gluon plasma phase by using the charge transfer fluctuations.