Probing the QCD phase structure with higher order baryon number susceptibilities within the NJL model * * Supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (11475085, 11535005, 11690030, 11575069, 11221504), and the MoST of China 973-Project ( 2015CB856901)

Abstract

Conserved charge fluctuations can be used to probe the phase structure of strongly interacting nuclear matter in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. To obtain the characteristic signatures of the conserved charge fluctuations for the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) phase transition, we study the susceptibilities of dense quark matter up to eighth order in detail, using an effective QCD-based model. We studied two cases, one with the QCD critical end point (CEP) and one without owing to an additional vector interaction term. The higher order susceptibilities display rich structures near the CEP and show sign changes as well as large fluctuations. These can provide us information about the presence and location of the CEP. Furthermore, we find that the case without the CEP also shows a similar sign change pattern, but with a relatively smaller magnitude compared with the case with the CEP. Finally, we conclude that higher order susceptibilities of conserved charge can be used to probe the QCD phase structures in heavy-ion collisions.