Conserved charge fluctuations can be used to probe the phase structure of strongly interacting nuclear matter in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. To obtain the characteristic signatures of the conserved charge fluctuations for the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) phase transition, we study the susceptibilities of dense quark matter up to eighth order in detail, using an effective QCD-based model. We studied two cases, one with the QCD critical end point (CEP) and one without owing to an additional vector interaction term. The higher order suscept...
