Evolutionary intermittency and the QCD critical point

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of the critical isoscalar condensate, formed during heavy-ion collisions. Our analysis is based on a simplified model where the sigma and the pions are the only degrees of freedom. In field description, both in physical and momentum space, we find that the freeze-out profile presents a structure which reveals clear traces of the critical fluctuations in the sigma-component. In particle representation, using Monte-Carlo simulations and factorial moment analysis, we show that signatures of the initial criticality survive at the detected pions. We propose the distribution of suitably defined intermittency indices, incorporating dynamical effects due to sigma-pion interaction, as the basic observable for the exploration of critical fluctuations in heavy-ion collision experiments.Comment: 22 pages, 8 figures, version published at Phys. Rev.