Fluctuation Probes of Quark Deconfinement

Abstract

The size of the average fluctuations of net baryon number and electric charge in a finite volume of hadronic matter differs widely between the confined and deconfined phases. These differences may be exploited as indicators of the formation of a quark-gluon plasma in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, because fluctuations created in the initial state survive until freeze-out due to the rapid expansion of the hot fireball.

Comments: 4 pages RevTeX, 1 figure; submitted simultaneously with hep-ph/0003168. Relative to v2 a typo was corrected, and the "Note added" was expanded by a clarifying sentence. This version accepted by Physical Review Letters