Hagedorn States and Thermalization in Heavy Ion Collisions

Abstract

In recent years, Hagedorn states have been used to explain the equilibrium and transport properties of a hadron gas close to the QCD critical temperature. These massive resonances are shown to lower $\eta/s$ to near the AdS/CFT limit close to the phase transition. A comparison of the Hagedorn model to recent lattice results is made and it is found that the hadrons can reach chemical equilibrium almost immediately, well before the chemical freeze-out temperatures found in thermal fits for a hadron gas without Hagedorn states.