Correlations between light and heavy flavors near the chiral crossover

TL;DR

This paper investigates how thermal fluctuations and correlations between light and heavy-light mesons reflect the chiral crossover in QCD, revealing that heavy-light flavor correlations can serve as indicators of chiral criticality.

Contribution

It introduces a chiral effective theory incorporating heavy quark symmetry to analyze light and heavy-light meson correlations near the chiral transition.

Findings

Heavy-light flavor correlations show remnants of chiral criticality.

The onset of the chiral crossover is independent of light flavors.

Strange charmed mesons can also signal the chiral crossover.

Abstract

Thermal fluctuations and correlations between the light and heavy-light mesons are explored within a chiral effective theory implementing heavy quark symmetry. We show, that various heavy-light flavor correlations indicate a remnant of the chiral criticality in a narrow range of temperature where the chiral susceptibility exhibits a peak structure. The onset of the chiral crossover, in the heavy-light flavor correlations, is therefore independent from the light flavors. This indicates that the fluctuations carried by strange charmed mesons can also be used to identify the chiral crossover, which is dominated by the non-strange light quark dynamics.