Flavor dependence of baryon melting temperature in effective models of QCD

Abstract

We apply the three-flavor (Polyakov-)Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model to generate baryons as quark-diquark bound states using many-body techniques at finite temperature. All the baryonic states belonging to the octet and decuplet flavor representations are generated in the isospin-symmetric case. For each state we extract the melting temperature at which the baryon may decay into a quark-diquark pair. We seek for an evidence of the strangeness dependence of the baryon melting temperature as suggested by the statistical thermal models and supported by lattice-QCD results. A clear and robust signal for this claim is found, pointing to a flavor dependence of the hadronic deconfinement temperature.

Comments: 23 pages, 12 figures, 6 appendices. v2: Quark condensates and susceptibilities are presented. One parameter of the PNJL model is modified to account for its dependence on the number of flavors; this brings a better agreement between the NJL and PNJL models. Typos are corrected and new references added. Version accepted for its publication in the Physical Review C journal