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Recent STAR data for the directed flow of protons, antiprotons and charged pions obtained within the beam energy scan program are analyzed within the Parton-Hadron-String-Dynamics (PHSD/HSD) transport models. Both versions of the kinetic approach are used to clarify the role of partonic degrees of freedom. The PHSD results, simulating a partonic phase and its coexistence with a hadronic one, are roughly consistent with the STAR data. Generally, the semi-qualitative agreement between the measured data and model results supports the idea of a crossover type of quark-hadron transition which softens the nuclear EoS but shows no indication of a first-order phase transition. Furthermore, the directed flow of kaons and antikaons is evaluated in the PHSD/HSD approachesfrom √sNN ≈ 3 - 200 GeV which shows a high sensitivity to hadronic potentials in the FAIR/NICA energy regime √sNN ≤ 8 GeV.
The effect of the chiral symmetry restoration (CSR) on observables from heavy-ion collisions is studied in the energy range =3–20 GeV within the Parton-Hadron-String Dynamics (PHSD) transport approach. The PHSD includes the deconfinement phase transition as well as essential aspects of CSR in the dense and hot hadronic medium, which are incorporated in the Schwinger mechanism for the hadronic particle production. We adopt different parametrizations of the nuclear equation of state from the non-linear σ - ω model, which enter in the computation of the quark scalar density for the CSR mechanism, in order to estimate the uncertainty in our calculations. For the pion-nucleon ∑-term we adopt ∑π ≈ 45 MeV which corresponds to a ’world average’. Our systematic studies show that chiral symmetry restoration plays a crucial role in the description of heavy-ion collisions at =3–20 GeV, realizing an increase of the hadronic particle production in the strangeness sector with respect to the non-strange one. We identify particle abundances and rapidity spectra to be suitable probes in order to extract information about CSR, while transverse mass spectra are less sensitive ones. Our results provide a microscopic explanation for the "horn" structure in the excitation function of the K+/π+ ratio: the CSR in the hadronic phase produces the steep increase of this particle ratio up to ≈ 7 GeV, while the drop at higher energies is associated to the appearance of a deconfined partonic medium.