Baryon-strangeness correlations: a diagnostic of strongly interacting matter

Phys Rev Lett. 2005 Oct 28;95(18):182301. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.182301. Epub 2005 Oct 24.

Abstract

The correlation between baryon number and strangeness elucidates the nature of strongly interacting matter, such as that formed transiently in high-energy nuclear collisions. This diagnostic can be extracted theoretically from lattice QCD calculations and experimentally from event-by-event fluctuations. The analysis of present lattice results above the critical temperature severely limits the presence of qq bound states, thus supporting a picture of independent (quasi)quarks.