Quark Matter

The antiproton puzzle, QCD critical point, and fireball properties in heavy-ion collisions

We analyze the behavior of ordinary and factorial cumulants of proton number in heavy-ion collisions in the context of new RHIC-BES-II data, their implications for the QCD critical point search, as well as the behavior of scaled factorial cumulants of protons and antiprotons, pointing out challenges in describing antiprotons and possible incomplete equilibration between stopped and produced matter in heavy-ion collisions.