Correlations between light and heavy flavors near the chiral crossover

Thermal fluctuations and correlations between the light and heavy-light mesons are explored within a chiral effective theory implementing heavy quark symmetry. We show that various heavy-light flavor correlations indicate a remnant of the chiral criticality in a narrow range of temperature in which the chiral susceptibility exhibits a peak structure. The onset of the chiral crossover, in the heavy-light flavor correlations, is therefore independent from the light flavors. This indicates that the fluctuations carried by strange charmed mesons can also be used to identify the chiral crossover, which is dominated by the nonstrange light quark dynamics.

Figure 1

Chiral susceptibilities of ${\sigma }_q$ and ${\sigma }_s$.

Figure 2

Flavor correlations among the light mesons.

Figure 3

Flavor correlations between the light and heavy-light mesons.

Figure 4

Flavor correlations among the heavy-light mesons.