Lattice QCD Results on Strangeness and Quasi-Quarks in Heavy-Ion Collisions

Abstract

Fluctuations of conserved quantities in heavy-ion collisions have been argued to be diagnostic tools for the nature of the produced phase. These can be related to the predictions of quark number susceptibilities (QNS) from lattice QCD. Using the diagonal QNS, we extracted the Wroblewski parameter in a dynamical QCD computation. Our results on the cross correlations \chi_{BQ}, \chi_{BY}, \chi_{BS} and \chi_{QY} allow us to explore the charge and baryon number of objects that carry flavour. We present evidence that in the high temperature phase of QCD the different flavour quantum numbers are excited in linkages which are exactly the same as one expects from quarks.

Comments: 9 pages, 6 Figures, Invited Talk at the International Conference on Strangeness in Quark Matter, ``SQM2006'', UCLA, Los Angeles, USA, Mar. 26-31, 2006