Second order cumulants of conserved charge fluctuations revisited I. Vanishing chemical potentials

Abstract

We update lattice QCD results for second order cumulants of conserved charge fluctuations and correlations at non-zero temperature and vanishing values of the conserved charge chemical potentials. We compare these results to hadron resonance gas calculations with and without excluded volume terms as well as S-matrix results in the hadronic phase of QCD, and comment on their current limitations. We, furthermore, use these results to characterize thermal conditions in the vicinity of the pseudo-critical line of the chiral transition in QCD. We argue that the ratio of strange to baryon chemical potentials is a robust observable that, on the one hand, deviates only little from hadron resonance gas results, but, on the other hand, is very sensitive to the spectrum of strange baryon resonances.