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

The STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider facility has reported results for the cumulants and their ratios from the net-proton distributions upto the fourth order cumulants at various collision energies. These measurements were carried to look for the signatures of the possible critical point (CP) in the phase diagram for a system undertaking strong interactions. The results show an intriguing dependence of the cumulant ratios C₃/C₂ and C₄/C₂ as a function of beam energy. The beam energy dependence appears to be non-monotonic in nature. However the experiment also reports that the energy dependence is observed to be consistent with expectation from an approach based on the independent production of proton and anti-protons in the collisions. In this paper we emphasize the need to have a proper baseline for appropriate interpretation of the cumulant measurements and argue that the comparison to independent production approach needs to be done with extreme caution