A Study of Fluctuations of Voids in Relativistic Ion-Ion Collisions

Event-by-event fluctuations (ebe) of hadronic patterns are investigated in terms of voids by analyzing the experimental data on 4.5, 14.5 and 60A GeV/c 16O-AgBr collisions. The findings are compared with the predictions of a multi-phase transport AMPT model. Dependence of voids on phase space bin width is examined in terms of two lowest moments of event-by-event fluctuations of voids, <Gq> and Sq. The findings reveal that scaling exponent estimated from the observed power-law behavior of the voids may be used to characterize the various properties of hadronic phase transition. The results also rule out occurrence of 2nd order quark-hadron phase transition at the projectile energies considered.