Critical behavior of hadronic fluctuations and the effect of final-state randomization - art. no. 054904

The critical behaviors of the quark-hadron phase transition are explored by use of the Ising model adapted for hadron production. Various measures inv olving the Fluctuations of the produced hadrons in bins of various sizes ar e examined with the aim of quantifying the clustering properties that are u niversal features of all critical phenomena. Some of the measures involve w avelet analysis. Two of the measures are found to exhibit the canonical pow er-law behavior near the critical temperature. The effect of final-state ra ndomization is studied by requiring the produced particles to take random w alks in the transverse plane. It is demonstrated that for the measures cons idered the dependence on the randomization process is weak. Since temperatu re is not a directly measurable variable. the average hadronic density of a portion of each event is used as the control variable that is measurable. The event-to-event fluctuations are taken into account in the study of the dependence of the chosen measures on that control variable. Phenomenologica lly verifiable critical behaviors are found and are proposed for use as a s ignature of quark-hadron phase transition in relativistic heavy-ion collisi ons. [S0556-2813(99)05410-2].