Conserved Charge Fluctuations from Lattice QCD and the Beam Energy Scan

We discuss the next-to-leading order Taylor expansion of ratios of cumulants of net-baryon number fluctuations. We focus on the relation between the skewness ratio, SBσB≡χ3B/χ1B, and the kurtosis ratio, κBσB2≡χ4B/χ2B. We show that differences in these two cumulant ratios are small for small values of the baryon chemical potential. The next-to-leading order correction to κBσB2 however is approximately three times larger than that for SBσB. The former thus drops much more rapidly with increasing beam energy, sNN. We argue that these generic patterns are consistent with current data on cumulants of net-proton number fluctuations measured by the STAR Collaboration at sNN≥19.6 GeV.