Probing Critical Fluctuations From Intermittency Analysis In Relativistic Heavy-ion Collisions

Critical behavior of a system unde.rgoing phase.transition has the intermittency property that it exhibits fluctuations of all scales.Detection of the intermittency prop?erty of local multiplicity fluctuations in the particle production in heavy-ion collisions has been proposed as a signature of the critical phenomenon.In this paper.it is shown that intermittency,a self-similar correlation with respect to the size of the phase space volume,is sensitive to critical density fluctuation of baryon multiplicity in system be-longing to the three-dimensional(3D)Ising universality class.The relation betwee.n intermittency index and ralative baryon density fluctuation is derived.We thus sug-gest that me.asuring the intemitte.ncy in relativistic he.avy-ion collisions could be used as a good probe of density fluctuations associated with the QCD critical phenom?ena.From recent preliminary results on baryon density fluctuations in central col-lisions at ?SNN=7.7,11.5,19.6,27,39,62.4,and 200GeV at RHIC/STAR,the collision energy de.pende.nce of intermittency index is extracted and shows a non-monotonic behavior with a peak at around 20-27GeV,indicating that the strength of intermit-tency becomes the largest in this energy region.The transport UrQMD model without implementing critical physics cannot describe the observed behavior.