Speaker
Description
Modifications in magnitude of fluctuations for different observables
are an excellent probe of a phase transition or its remnant.
In heavy-ion collision, fluctuations related to conserved charges
carried by light and strange quarks play an important role to identify
the QCD chiral crossover and deconfinement properties.
Recent Lattice QCD simulations have revealed that the charmed mesons
are deconfined together with light-flavor mesons in the temperature
range where the chiral symmetry is partially restored. This result
strongly suggests that the light-flavor dynamics interferes non-trivially
with the heavy flavors.
We show that the heavy quark dynamics is tied to the light flavor
physics, and the thermodynamics is strongly dragged by the chiral
crossover dominated by the non-strange flavors. Consequently,
the fluctuations carried by the states with strangeness can be used to characterize the onset of the chiral symmetry restoration.
We also discuss a possible phase structure of dense QCD matter within
a toy model that handles the onset of different Fermionic degrees of
freedom, either nucleons or quarks, depepnding on densiy. Selected
key quantities, the baryon number and its susceptibility as well as
the Polyakov-loop fluctuations, are used to characterize phases at
finite density.
