Speaker
Description
Fluctuations of conserved charges such as baryon number, electric charge, and strangeness are effective probes of the QCD phase diagram. Their higher-order cumulants are particularly sensitive to critical phenomena and remain an important focus of current heavy-ion research.
In this work, an exploratory study of strangeness fluctuations in Ag+Ag collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 2.55~\text{GeV}$, measured with the High Acceptance Di-Electron Spectrometer (HADES), a fixed-target experiment at GSI, Germany, is presented. Operating in the $1–2A~\text{GeV}$ regime, HADES accesses QCD medium at high net-baryon density and low temperature, providing complementary coverage to higher-energy programs.
The very low strange-hadron yields at these energies necessitate robust particle identification. Therefore, a fuzzy-logic-based probabilistic technique is employed to reconstruct strange-hadron multiplicity moments.
This contribution focuses on the feasibility study of strangeness fluctuations at HADES, including the identification and reconstruction performance for strange particles, and the resulting cumulants of their multiplicity distributions.
$^*$This work is supported by ``Netzwerke 2021'', an initiative of the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of Northrhine Westphalia.
