Strangeness at high temperatures: from hadrons to quarks

Lattice QCD and heavy ion collisions: a review of recent progress

In the last few years, numerical simulations of Quantum chromodynamics on the lattice have reached a new level of accuracy. A wide range of thermodynamic quantities is now available in the continuum limit and for physical quark masses. This allows a comparison with measurements from heavy ion collisions for the first time. Furthermore, calculations of dynamical quantities are also becoming available. The combined effort from first principles and experiment allows us to gain an unprecedented understanding of the properties of quark-gluon plasma. I will review the state-of-the-art results from lattice simulations and connect them to the experimental information from the relativistic heavy ion collider and the large hadron collider.

From Heavy-Ion Collisions to Compact Stars: Equation of State and Relevance of the System Size

In this article, we start by presenting state-of-the-art methods allowing us to compute moments related to the globally conserved baryon number, by means of first principle resummed perturbative frameworks. We focus on such quantities for they convey important properties of the finite temperature and density equation of state, being particularly sensitive to changes in the degrees of freedom across the quark-hadron phase transition. We thus present various number susceptibilities along with the corresponding results as obtained by lattice quantum chromodynamics collaborations, and comment on their comparison. Next, omitting the importance of coupling corrections and considering a zero-density toy model for the sake of argument, we focus on corrections due to the small size of heavy-ion collision systems, by means of spatial compactifications. Briefly motivating the relevance of finite size effects in heavy-ion physics, in opposition to the compact star physics, we present a few preliminary thermodynamic results together with the speed of sound for certain finite size relativistic quantum systems at very high temperature.

van der Waals Interactions and Hadron Resonance Gas: Role of resonance widths modeling on conserved charges fluctuations

The quantum van der Waals (QvdW) extension of the ideal hadron resonance gas (HRG) model which includes the attractive and repulsive interactions between baryons – the QvdW-HRG model – is applied to study the behavior of the baryon number related susceptibilities in the crossover temperature region. Inclusion of the QvdW interactions leads to a qualitatively different behavior of susceptibilities, in many cases resembling lattice QCD simulations. It is shown that for some observables, in particular for χBQ11/χB2, effects of the QvdW interactions essentially cancel out. It is found that the inclusion of the finite resonance widths leads to an improved description of χB2, but it also leads to a worse description of χBQ11/χB2, as compared to the lattice data. On the other hand, inclusion of the extra, unconfirmed baryons into the hadron list leads to a simultaneous improvement in the description of both observables.

van der Waals Interactions in Hadron Resonance Gas: From Nuclear Matter to Lattice QCD

An extension of the ideal hadron resonance gas (HRG) model is constructed which includes the attractive and repulsive van der Waals (VDW) interactions between baryons. This VDW-HRG model yields the nuclear liquid-gas transition at low temperatures and high baryon densities. The VDW parameters a and b are fixed by the ground state properties of nuclear matter, and the temperature dependence of various thermodynamic observables at zero chemical potential are calculated within the VDW-HRG model. Compared to the ideal HRG model, the inclusion of VDW interactions between baryons leads to a qualitatively different behavior of second and higher moments of fluctuations of conserved charges, in particular in the so-called crossover region T∼140-190  MeV. For many observables this behavior resembles closely the results obtained from lattice QCD simulations. This hadronic model also predicts nontrivial behavior of net-baryon fluctuations in the region of phase diagram probed by heavy-ion collision experiments. These results imply that VDW interactions play a crucial role in the thermodynamics of hadron gas. Thus, the commonly performed comparisons of the ideal HRG model with the lattice and heavy-ion data may lead to misconceptions and misleading conclusions.

Suppression of Baryon Diffusion and Transport in a Baryon Rich Strongly Coupled Quark-Gluon Plasma

Five dimensional black hole solutions that describe the QCD crossover transition seen in (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD calculations at zero and nonzero baryon densities are used to obtain predictions for the baryon susceptibility, baryon conductivity, baryon diffusion constant, and thermal conductivity of the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma in the range of temperatures 130  MeV≤T≤300  MeV and baryon chemical potentials 0≤μ(B)≤400  MeV. Diffusive transport is predicted to be suppressed in this region of the QCD phase diagram, which is consistent with the existence of a critical end point at larger baryon densities. We also calculate the fourth-order baryon susceptibility at zero baryon chemical potential and find quantitative agreement with recent lattice results. The baryon transport coefficients computed in this Letter can be readily implemented in state-of-the-art hydrodynamic codes used to investigate the dense QGP currently produced at RHIC's low energy beam scan.

Additional strange hadrons from QCD thermodynamics and strangeness freezeout in heavy ion collisions

We compare lattice QCD results for appropriate combinations of net strangeness fluctuations and their correlations with net baryon number fluctuations with predictions from two hadron resonance gas (HRG) models having different strange hadron content. The conventionally used HRG model based on experimentally established strange hadrons fails to describe the lattice QCD results in the hadronic phase close to the QCD crossover. Supplementing the conventional HRG with additional, experimentally uncharted strange hadrons predicted by quark model calculations and observed in lattice QCD spectrum calculations leads to good descriptions of strange hadron thermodynamics below the QCD crossover. We show that the thermodynamic presence of these additional states gets imprinted in the yields of the ground-state strange hadrons leading to a systematic 5-8 MeV decrease of the chemical freeze-out temperatures of ground-state strange baryons.

Is there a flavor hierarchy in the deconfinement transition of QCD?

We present possible indications for flavor separation during the QCD crossover transition based on continuum extrapolated lattice QCD calculations of higher order susceptibilities. We base our findings on flavor-specific quantities in the light and strange quark sector. We propose a possible experimental verification of our prediction, based on the measurement of higher order moments of identified particle multiplicities. Since all our calculations are performed at zero baryochemical potential, these results are of particular relevance for the heavy-ion program at the LHC.