Intermittency analysis of proton numbers in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC energies

Local density fluctuation near the QCD critical point has been suggested to exhibit a power-law behavior which can be probed by an intermittency analysis on scaled factorial moment (SFM) in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The collision energy and centrality dependence of the second-order SFMs are systematically investigated in Au + Au collisions at √ sNN = 7.7, 11.5, 19.6, 27, 39, 62.4, 200 GeV within the UrQMD model. We estimate the non-critical background in the measurement of intermittency and suggest a cumulative variable method to effectively remove the contributions from background. We further study the effect of particle detection efficiency by implementing UrQMD events in the RHIC/STAR experimental tracking efficiencies. A cell-by-cell method is proposed for experimental application of efficiency corrections on SFM. This work can provide a guidance of background subtraction and efficiency correction for experimental measurement of intermittency in the search of QCD critical point in heavy-ion collisions.