Testing the hadronic spectrum in the strange sector

Abstract

Heavier resonances are continually being added to the hadronic spectrum from the Particle Data Group that follow an exponentially increasing mass spectrum. However, it has been suggested that even further states predicted from Quark Models are needed in the hadronic spectrum in order to improve the agreement between the hadron resonance gas model predictions and lattice QCD data. We find that the inclusion of such states with extrapolated branching ratios slightly decreases the freezeout temperature. To eliminate ambiguities, we introduce a first principle method to extract the freeze-out temperature for charged kaons from experimental data, which yields a lower bound of $T_{\text{fo}} \gtrsim $145 MeV for the highest collision energy at RHIC.