https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-023-11942-9
Regular Article - Experimental Physics
Search for the critical point of strongly-interacting matter in 40Ar + 45Sc collisions at 150A Ge V /c using scaled factorial moments of protons
1
National Nuclear Research Center, Baku, Azerbaijan
2
Faculty of Physics, University of Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria
3
Ruđjer Bošković Institute, Zagreb, Croatia
4
LPNHE, University of Paris VI and VII, Paris, France
5
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany
6
University of Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
7
University of Athens, Athens, Greece
8
Wigner Research Centre for Physics, Budapest, Hungary
9
Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
10
Institute for Particle and Nuclear Studies, Tsukuba, Japan
11
Okayama University, Okayama, Japan
12
University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
13
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
14
Jan Kochanowski University, Kielce, Poland
15
Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Cracow, Poland
16
National Centre for Nuclear Research, Warsaw, Poland
17
Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland
18
AGH-University of Science and Technology, Cracow, Poland
19
University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland
20
University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland
21
University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland
22
Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland
23
Affiliated with an Institution Covered by a Cooperation Agreement with CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
24
University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia
25
Fermilab, Batavia, USA
26
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, USA
27
University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
28
University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, USA
29
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA
Received:
15
May
2023
Accepted:
19
August
2023
Published online:
30
September
2023
The critical point of dense, strongly interacting matter is searched for at the CERN SPS in 40Ar + 45Sc collisions at 150A Ge V /c. The dependence of second-order scaled factorial moments of proton multiplicity distribution on the number of subdivisions of transverse momentum space is measured. The intermittency analysis is performed using both transverse momentum and cumulative transverse momentum. For the first time, statistically independent data sets are used for each subdivision number. The obtained results do not indicate any statistically significant intermittency pattern. An upper limit on the fraction of correlated proton pairs and the power of the correlation function is obtained based on a comparison with the Power-law Model developed for this purpose.
J. Puzović: Deceased.
© The Author(s) 2023
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