Probing the incompressibility of dense hadronic matter near the QCD phase transition in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Based on the extended hadronic transport model of relativistic heavy-ion collisions, the incompressibility of dense hadronic matter created in relativistic Au + Au heavy-ion collisions at root sNN = 3 GeV is studied. By comparing experimental proton directed flow, productions of strange hadrons phi, K- as well as their ratio phi/K-, proton high-order cumulants to the model calculations, a large incompressibility of dense hadronic matter is obtained from nucleon observabels while a rather small incompressibility is needed to fit the data of strange hadrons. This may indicate hadronic matter possesses different incompressibilities in different density regions, i.e., the incompressibility may become stiffer from saturation density to a certain baryon density and then turn to soft before reaching hadron-quark phase transition. The study also shows that the incompressibility significantly affects the critical baryon density of hadron-quark phase transition.