Correlations between light and heavy flavors near the chiral crossover

Understand

Thermal fluctuations and correlations between the light and heavy-light mesons are explored within a chiral effective theory implementing heavy quark symmetry.

• We show, that various heavy-light flavor correlations indicate a remnant of the chiral criticality in a narrow range of temperature where the chiral susceptibility exhibits a peak structure.
• The onset of the chiral crossover, in the heavy-light flavor correlations, is therefore independent from the light flavors.
• This indicates that the fluctuations carried by strange charmed mesons can also be used to identify the chiral crossover, which is dominated by the non-strange light quark dynamics.