Baseline measures for net-proton distributions in high energy heavy-ion collisions

We report a systematic comparison of the recently measured cumulants of the net-proton distributions for 0–5% central Au + Au collisions in the first phase of the Beam Energy Scan (BES) Program at the Relativistic Heavy Collider facility to various kinds of possible baseline measures. These baseline measures correspond to an assumption that the proton and anti-proton distributions follow Poisson statistics, Binomial statistics, obtained from a transport model calculation and from a hadron resonance gas model. The higher order cumulant net-proton data for the center of mass energies (sNN) of 19.6 and 27 GeV are observed to deviate from most of the baseline measures studied. The deviations are predominantly due to the difference in shape of the proton distributions between data and those obtained in the baseline measures. We also present a detailed study on the relevance of the independent production approach as a baseline for comparison with the measurements at various beam energies. Our studies point to the need of either more detailed baseline models for the experimental measurements or a description via QCD calculations in order to extract the exact physics process that leads to deviation of the data from the baselines presented.