  The study of event-by-event fluctuations of net-baryon number in a subspace
of full phase space is a promising direction for deciphering the structure of
strongly interacting matter created in head-on collisions of relativistic heavy
nuclei. Such fluctuations are generally suppressed by exact baryon number
conservation. Moreover, the suppression is stronger if baryon number is
conserved locally. In this report we present a conceptually new approach to
quantify correlations in rapidity space between baryon-antibaryon,
baryon-baryon, and antibaryon-antibaryon pairs and demonstrate their impact on
net-baryon number fluctuations. For the special case of Gaussian rapidity
distributions, we use the Cholesky factorization of the covariance matrix,
while the general case is introduced by exploiting the well-known Metropolis
and Simulated Annealing methods. The approach is based on the use of the
canonical ensemble of statistical mechanics for baryon number and can be
applied to study correlations between baryons as well as strange and/or charm
hadrons. It can also be applied to describe relativistic nuclear collisions
leading to the production of multi-particle final states. One application of
our method is the search for formation of proton clusters at low collision
energies emerging as a harbinger of the anticipated first-order chiral phase
transition. In a first step, the results obtained are compared to the recent
measurements from the CERN ALICE collaboration. Such investigations are key to
explore the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter and baryon production
mechanisms at energy scales from several GeV to several TeV.
