Speaker
Description
At extreme temperatures the behavior of hadronic matter depends on the
type of excitations that can exist in a thermal medium. This information
is encoded within the spectral functions of hadronic correlators. Using
lattice data for correlators of pseudo-scalar meson operators in $2+1$
flavour QCD we investigate the presence of particle-like excitations,
so-called thermoparticles. In particular, we extract the spectral
contribution of these potential excitations from spatial correlators at
two temperatures close to the pseudo-critical temperature, and test the
robustness of these components by comparing their temporal correlator
predictions with the corresponding data. Our findings suggest that
pseudo-scalar mesons have a bound-state-like structure within the chiral
crossover region, and this is influenced by the vacuum states of the theory.
