On a first order transition in QCD with up, down and strange quarks

Understand

We consider the quark-mass dependence of the baryon octet and decuplet ground state masses.

• It is predicted that QCD dynamics implies a first order transition when increasing the strange quark mass from its chiral limit towards its physical value.
• Our claim relies on a global fit to the available QCD lattice data on such baryon masses.
• Quantitative results based on an application of the chiral SU(3) Lagrangian at N$^3$LO are discussed.