Quark number susceptibilities, strangeness and dynamical confinement

TL;DR

This paper presents the first measurements of strange quark number susceptibility across a wide temperature range in QCD, revealing significant deviations from ideal gas behavior and supporting the concept of dynamical confinement in the quark-gluon plasma.

Contribution

It provides novel lattice QCD results on quark susceptibilities, highlighting their behavior near the phase transition and their relation to confinement mechanisms.

Findings

Chi_s jumps at T_c and increases rapidly above it.

Significant deviations from ideal-gas values across all temperatures.

Strong correlation between susceptibilities and scalar/pseudo-scalar channels.

Abstract

We report first results on the strange quark number susceptibility, chi_s, over a large range of temperatures, mainly in the plasma phase of QCD. Chi_s jumps across the phase transition temperature, T_c, and grows rapidly with temperature above but close to T_c. For all quark masses and susceptibilities in the entire temperature range studied, we found significant departures from ideal-gas values. We also observed a strong correlation between these quantities and the susceptibility in the scalar/pseudo-scalar channel, supporting ideas of ``dynamical confinement'' in the high temperature phase of the QCD plasma.