Charge Fluctuations as Thermometer for Heavy-Ion Collisions

Abstract

We present a determination of freeze-out conditions in heavy-ion collisions based on ratios of cu- mulants of net electric charge fluctuations obtained from lattice QCD. These ratios can reliably be calculated for a wide range of chemical potential values by using a next-to-leading order Taylor series expansion around the limit of vanishing baryon, electric charge and strangeness chemical potentials. We first determine the strangeness and electric charge chemical potentials that characterize the conditions in heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC. We then show that a comparison of lattice QCD results for ratios of up to third order cumulants of electric charge fluctuations with experimental results allows us to extract the freeze-out baryon chemical potential and the freeze-out temperature. We apply our method to preliminary data of the STAR and PHENIX collaborations.