Thermal blurring of event-by-event fluctuations provoked by rapidity conversion

Abstract

We study the effect of thermal blurring caused by the use of (momentum-space) rapidity as a proxy of coordinate-space rapidity in experimental measurements of conserved charge fluctuations in relativistic heavy ion collisions. In theoretical studies assuming statistical mechanics, calculated fluctuations are those in a spatial volume. Experiments, on the other hand, can measure fluctuations only in a momentum-space in the final state. In a standard argument to compare experimental results for a momentum space with theoretical studies for a coordinate space, rapidities of particles are implicitly regarded as equivalent to their coordinate-space rapidity. We show that the relation of two fluctuations is significantly altered by the existence of the thermal motion, i.e. thermal blurring. We discuss that the thermal blurring can be regarded as a part of the diffusion process, and the effect can be understood by studying the rapidity window dependences of fluctuations. Centrality dependence of the thermal blurring effect is also discussed.