Higher cumulants of baryon number in critical QCD

Abstract

We study the higher moments of the baryon number in the immediate neighbourhood of the QCD critical endpoint within the framework of Ising-QCD thermodynamics (N.~G. Antoniou {\it et al}, arXiv:1705.09124 [hep-ph]). We show that the kurtosis, as a function of the freeze-out baryon chemical potential, attains a sharp minimum very close to the critical point. We argue that the sharpness of this minimum is due to the narrowness of the critical region in the chemical potential direction. Our analysis reveals that the broad minimum of the kurtosis observed in Au+Au central collisions at STAR (in RHIC-BES I) in the colliding energy region $17$ GeV $< ~\sqrt{s}~<$ $39$ GeV is apparently only a precursor of the critical point and not a signature of its location.