Off-diagonal correlators of conserved charges from lattice QCD and how to relate them to experiment

Like fluctuations, nondiagonal correlators of conserved charges provide a tool for the study of chemical freeze-out in heavy ion collisions. They can be calculated in thermal equilibrium using lattice simulations, and be connected to moments of event-by-event net-particle multiplicity distributions. We calculate them from continuum-extrapolated lattice simulations at mu(B) = 0, and present a finite-mu(B) extrapolation, comparing two different methods. In order to relate the grand canonical observables to the experimentally available net-particle fluctuations and correlations, we perform a hadron resonance gas model analysis, which allows us to completely break down the contributions from different hadrons. We then construct suitable hadronic proxies for fluctuation ratios, and study their behavior at finite chemical potentials. We also study the effect of introducing acceptance cuts, and argue that the small dependence of certain ratios on the latter allows for a direct comparison with lattice QCD results, provided that the same cuts are applied to all hadronic species. Finally, we perform a comparison for the constructed quantities for experimentally available measurements from the STAR Collaboration. Thus, we estimate the chemical freeze-out temperature to 165 MeV using a strangeness-related proxy. This is a rather high temperature for the use of the hadron resonance gas; thus, further lattice studies are necessary to provide first principle results at intermediate mu(B).