Effect of finite particle number sampling on baryon number fluctuations

Abstract

The effects of finite particle number sampling on the net baryon number cumulants, extracted from fluid dynamical simulations, are studied. The commonly used finite particle number sampling procedure introduces an additional Poissonian (or multinomial if global baryon number conservation is enforced) contribution which increases the extracted moments of the baryon number distribution. If this procedure is applied to a fluctuating fluid dynamics framework one severely overestimates the actual cumulants. We show that the sampling of so called test-particles suppresses the additional contribution to the moments by at least one power of the number of test-particles. We demonstrate this method in a numerical fluid dynamics simulation that includes the effects of spinodal decomposition due to a first order phase transition. Furthermore, in the limit where anti-baryons can be ignored, we derive analytic formulas which capture exactly the effect of particle sampling on the baryon number cumulants. These formulas may be used to test the various numerical particle sampling algorithms.