Flavor dependence of baryon melting temperature in effective models of QCD

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the melting temperature of baryons depends on their flavor composition using an effective QCD model, revealing a clear flavor dependence in the deconfinement process.

Contribution

It demonstrates the flavor dependence of baryon melting temperatures within a three-flavor (Polyakov-)Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model, supporting previous lattice-QCD and thermal model findings.

Findings

Baryon melting temperatures vary with strangeness content.

The model shows a robust flavor dependence of the deconfinement temperature.

Supports the hypothesis of flavor-dependent hadronic melting in QCD.

Abstract

We apply the three-flavor (Polyakov-)Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model to generate baryons as quark-diquark bound states using many-body techniques at finite temperature. All the baryonic states belonging to the octet and decuplet flavor representations are generated in the isospin-symmetric case. For each state we extract the melting temperature at which the baryon may decay into a quark-diquark pair. We seek for an evidence of the strangeness dependence of the baryon melting temperature as suggested by the statistical thermal models and supported by lattice-QCD results. A clear and robust signal for this claim is found, pointing to a flavor dependence of the hadronic deconfinement temperature.