On the role of the strange quark and its mass in the chiral phase transition

Abstract

The evolution of the chiral condensate with the temperature is studied using SU(3) Chiral Perturbation Theory and the virial expansion. We observe a large decrease of the melting temperature of the non-strange condensate compared with the SU(2) case. Due to the larger mass of the strange quark we also find an slower temperature evolution of the strange condensate compared with the non-strange condensate.

To appear in the proceedings of the XXXVIIth Rencontres de Moriond: QCD And High Energy Hadronic Interactions. 4 pages References and numerical bug corrected in agreement with final version of article to appear in Phys Rev D