Deconfinement and freezeout boundaries in equilibrium thermal models

In different approaches, the temperature-baryon density plane of QCD matter is studied for deconfinement and chemical freezeout boundaries. Results from various heavy-ion experiments are compared with the recent lattice simulations, the effective QCD-like Polyakov linear-sigma model, and the equilibrium thermal models. Along the entire freezeout boundary, there is an excellent agreement between the thermal model calculations and the experiments. Also, the thermal model calculations agree well with the estimations deduced from the Polyakov linear-sigma model (PLSM). At low baryonic density or high energies, both deconfinement and chemical freezeout boundaries are likely coincident, and therefore, the agreement with the lattice simulations becomes excellent as well, while at large baryonic density, the two boundaries become distinguishable forming a phase where hadrons and quark-gluon plasma likely coexist. Copyright © 2020 Abdel Nasser Tawfik et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The publication of this article was funded by SCOAP3.