Paper detail

Overview of fluctuation and correlation measurements

One of the ultimate goals of nuclear collision experiments at high energy is to map the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter. A very challenging task is the determination of the QCD phase structure including the search for critical behavior and verification of the possible existence of a critical end point of a first order phase transition line. A promising tool to probe the presence of critical behavior is the study of fluctuations and correlations of conserved charges since, in a thermal system, these fluctuations are directly related to the equation of state (EoS) of the system under the study. In this report an overview is given of several experimental measurements on net-proton multiplicity distributions such as cumulants and multi-particle correlation functions.