Chiral condensate from a hadron resonance gas model

Abstract

In this work we address the question of how well the chiral crossover transition can be understood in terms of a noninteracting hadron resonance gas model. Using the latest results on the variation of hadron masses as a function of the pion mass from lattice quantum chromodynamics, we study the temperature dependence of the renormalized chiral condensate in 2+1 flavor QCD. Furthermore, we suggest a better criterion to estimate of the pseudocritical temperature, which gives $T_c = 161.2 \pm 1.7$ MeV, which is much improved compared to all the earlier results within the hadron resonance gas model or chiral perturbation theory. For the curvature of the pseudocritical line we find $\kappa_2 = 0.0203(7)$, which is in very good agreement with continuum extrapolated lattice results.