https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-024-13012-0
Regular Article - Experimental Physics
Search for a critical point of strongly-interacting matter in central 
Ar + 
Sc collisions at 13 A–75 A GeV/c beam momentum
1
National Nuclear Research Center, Baku, Azerbaijan
2
Faculty of Physics, University of Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria
3
Ruđer 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:
10
January
2024
Accepted:
11
June
2024
Published online:
26
July
2024
The critical point of strongly interacting matter is searched for at the CERN SPS by the NA61/SHINE experiment in central Ar + Sc collisions at 13 A, 19 A, 30 A, 40 A, and 75 A GeV/c. The dependence of the second-order scaled factorial moments of proton multiplicity distributions on the number of subdivisions in transverse momentum space is measured. The intermittency analysis uses statistically independent data sets for every subdivision in transverse and cumulative-transverse momentum variables. The results obtained do not indicate the searched intermittent pattern. An upper limit on the fraction of correlated protons and the intermittency index is obtained based on a comparison with the Power-law Model.
H. Adhikary, J. Puzović: Deceased.
© The Author(s) 2024
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Funded by SCOAP3.
