Meson thermal masses at different temperatures

TL;DR

This study investigates how meson masses change with temperature, exploring the transition from hadron gas to quark-gluon plasma and chiral symmetry restoration using lattice QCD simulations.

Contribution

It provides new lattice QCD results on meson mass behavior across different temperatures, including light, strange, and charm mesons, with improved Wilson-clover fermions.

Findings

Meson masses decrease with increasing temperature.

Chiral symmetry restoration affects meson mass degeneracy.

Transition to quark-gluon plasma observed at high temperatures.

Abstract

We determine the ground state meson masses at low temperature using simulations with $2+1$ flavours of improved Wilson-clover fermions. Subsequently we study the effect of increasing the temperature of the hadron gas, including the transition to the quark-gluon plasma, as well as the restoration of $SU(2)_A$ chiral symmetry. We use the FASTSUM anisotropic, fixed-scale Generation2L ensembles and consider mesons with light, strange and charm content.