Hydrodynamics of charge fluctuations and balance functions

We apply stochastic hydrodynamics to the study of charge-density fluctuations in QCD matter undergoing Bjorken expansion. We find that the charge-density correlations are given by a time integral over the history of the system, with the dominant contribution coming from the QCD crossover region where the change of susceptibility per entropy, χT /s, is most significant. We study the rapidity and azimuthal angle dependence of the resulting charge balance function using a simple analytic model of heavy-ion collision evolution. Our results are in agreement with experimental measurements, indicating that hydrodynamic fluctuations contribute significantly to the measured charge correlations in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. The sensitivity of the balance function to the value of the charge diffusion coefficient D allows us to estimate the typical value of this coefficient in the crossover region to be rather small, of the order of (2πT ) −1, characteristic of a strongly coupled plasma