Heavy ion collisions at ultrarelativistic energies are expected to provide an environment where quarks and gluons replace hadrons as the appropriate degrees of freedom. As the excited region expands and cools, the transition to the hadronic state might be characterized by phase separation with hadrons being emitted from dense droplets of quark-gluon matter. Here we study four techniques to search for such droplets: rapidity correlations, identical kaon correlations, φ meson production, and proton correlations. We conclude that rapidity correlations are the clearest signal of such fluctuations, and that proton correlations and φ production can also be strongly affected by drop formation.

• Received 8 December 1993

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.49.2722