Net-Baryon fluctuations at the QCD critical point

Abstract

In the vicinity of the quark-hadron critical point, in the phase diagram of QCD, simple power-law relations constrain the mid-rapidity net-baryon density profile, for different heavy-ion processes, in a unifying scheme. The corresponding scaling variable specifies the proximity of a given experiment to the critical point. An important phenomenological aspect of the critical properties in the baryonic sector is the possibility to observe intermittency effects in the phase space distribution of net baryons.