Hadronization conditions in relativistic nuclear collisions and the QCD pseudo-critical line

TL;DR

This study compares hadronization conditions in relativistic nuclear collisions with lattice QCD predictions, revealing a consistent pseudo-critical line and temperature, by correcting for post-hadronization rescattering effects.

Contribution

It introduces a method to accurately determine hadronization parameters by incorporating rescattering corrections, aligning experimental results with lattice QCD calculations.

Findings

Hadronization temperature at mu_B=0 is 164.3 MeV.

Curvature of the pseudo-critical line is 0.0048 ± 0.0026.

Rescattering corrections improve fit quality significantly.

Abstract

We compare the reconstructed hadronization conditions in relativistic nuclear collisions in the nucleon-nucleon centre-of-mass energy range 4.7-2760 GeV in terms of temperature and baryon-chemical potential with lattice QCD calculations, by using hadronic multiplicities. We obtain hadronization temperatures and baryon chemical potentials with a fit to measured multiplicities by correcting for the effect of post-hadronization rescattering. The post-hadronization modification factors are calculated by means of a coupled hydrodynamical-transport model simulation under the same conditions of approximate isothermal and isochemical decoupling as assumed in the statistical hadronization model fits to the data. The fit quality is considerably better than without rescattering corrections, as already found in previous work. The curvature of the obtained "true" hadronization pseudo-critical line kappa is found to be 0.0048 +- 0.0026, in agreement with lattice QCD estimates; the pseudo-critical temperature at vanishing mu_B is found to be 164.3+-1.8 MeV.