Estimate of background baseline and upper limit on the chiral magnetic effect in isobar collisions at $\sqrt{S_{NN}}$=200 GeV at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
For the search of the chiral magnetic effect (CME), STAR previously presented the results from isobar collisions ($^{96}_{44}$Ru + $^{96}_{44}$Ru, $^{96}_{40}$Zr + $^{96}_{40}$Zr) obtained through a blind analysis. The ratio of results in Ru+Ru to Zr+Zr collisions for the CME-sensitive charge-dependent azimuthal correlator (Δ𝛾), normalized by elliptic anisotropy (𝑣2), was observed to be close to but systematically larger than the inverse multiplicity ratio. The background baseline for the isobar ratio, 𝑌= (Δ𝛾/𝑣2) Ru /(Δ𝛾/𝑣2) Zr , is naively expected to be (1/𝑁) Ru /(1/𝑁) Zr ; however, genuine two- and three-particle correlations are expected to alter it. We estimate the contributions to 𝑌 from those correlations, utilizing both the isobar data and hijing simulations. After including those contributions, we arrive at a final background baseline for 𝑌, which is consistent with the isobar data. Here, we extract an upper limit for the CME fraction in the Δ𝛾 measurement of approximately 10% at a 95% confidence level on in isobar collisions at $\sqrt{S_{NN}}$=200 GeV, with an expected 15% difference in their squared magnetic fields.