Probing baryon correlations in heavy-ion collisions with factorial cumulants

We study proton/antiproton factorial cumulants as a probe of correlations among baryons in a hot QCD medium created in heavy-ion collisions. Using a recently developed formalism of density correlations, we incorporate the effect of (local) baryon number conservation and short-range baryon correlations. In particular, baryon-antibaryon annihilation in the hadronic phase is expected to have a distinct impact on factorial cumulants of (anti)protons. We present predictions for the acceptance dependence of various proton/antiproton cumulants and factorial cumulants in heavy-ion collisions at LHC and RHIC energies, and discuss how the experimental measurements can constrain the strength of baryon annihilation.