Strangeness fluctuations in the HADES experiment

The QCD phase diagram has been actively studied over the years in the experimental, and theoretical domains using e.g. lattice QCD. The fluctuations of conserved charges like electric charge, baryon number, and strangeness are useful probes to study the QCD phase diagram. The experimental study of higher-order cumulants provides insights into potential critical behaviour, and is being analysed in different experiments. This work focuses on the analysis of strangeness fluctuations in Ag+Ag data collected at a beam energy of $1.58$$\text{A}\,\text{GeV}$ using the High Acceptance DiElectron Spectrometer (HADES) in 2019. HADES is a fixed target experiment at GSI that investigates the properties of dense baryonic matter at lower energy regimes around $1$$\text{A}\,\text{GeV}$-$2$$\text{A}\,\text{GeV}$ beam energy. The lower multiplicity of strange particles in this dataset poses a challenge in deriving and analysing their higher-order cumulants. This necessitates an exploratory study on the feasibility of using these strange particles in this analysis of strangeness fluctuations. The reconstruction and identification of charged kaons as proxies for strangeness, in general, are examined in HADES Ag-Ag data and will be presented in this paper.