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

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.

4 pages, 3 figures. Contribution to the proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Strangeness in Quark Matter (SQM2017), Utrecht, the Netherlands, 10-15 July 2017