Melting and freeze-out conditions of hadrons in a thermal medium

TL;DR

This paper investigates the conditions under which hadrons melt and freeze out in a thermal medium, using models to determine deconfinement and decoupling points based on temperature, flavor, mass, and cross section.

Contribution

It introduces two independent frameworks for unambiguously determining hadron melting and freeze-out conditions in a thermal medium, considering flavor, mass, and cross section dependencies.

Findings

Hadrons' melting temperatures depend on their strangeness content.

Decoupling times vary with particle mass and cross section.

Evidence of flavor and mass dependence in hadronization and freeze-out conditions.

Abstract

We describe two independent frameworks which provide unambiguous determinations of the deconfinement and the decoupling conditions of a relativistic gas at finite temperature. First, we use the Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model to compute meson and baryon masses at finite temperature and determine their melting temperature as a function of their strangeness content. Second, we analyze a simple expanding gas within a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric, which admits a well-defined decoupling mechanism. We examine the decoupling time as a function of the particle mass and cross section. We find evidences of an inherent dependence of the hadronization and freeze-out conditions on flavor, and on mass and cross section, respectively.