Energy and centrality dependent study of deconfinement phase transition in a color string percolation approach at RHIC energies

Abstract

We take the experimental data for transverse momentum spectra of identified charged hadrons in different centrality classes for nucleus-nucleus (A+A) collisions at various Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) energies measured by the STAR collaboration. We analyse these data in the framework of color string percolation model (CSPM) in order to extract various percolation parameters at different centralities at RHIC energies to study the effect of collision geometry and collision energy. We use these parameters to study the centrality dependent behaviour of initial temperature of the percolation cluster, energy density, average transverse momentum, shear viscosity to entropy density ratio ($\eta/s$) and trace anomaly for different energies at RHIC from $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}$ = 19.6 to 200 GeV. These observables are found to strongly depend on centrality at various collision energies. The critical percolation density, which is related to the deconfinement phase transition is achieved in the most central nucleus-nucleus collisions, while it fails in the peripheral collisions. A universal scaling is observed in color suppression factor and initial temperatures when studied as a function of charged particle pseudorapidity distribution scaled by nuclear overlap area at RHIC energies. The minimum of $\eta/s$ is observed in the most central collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}$ = 130 and 200 GeV.