Many more charm at the freezeout?

Understanding the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter
described by Quantum Chromodynamics(QCD) is an exciting field of
research. There are large scale ongoing experiments in RHIC at
Brookhaven National Laboratory and at CERN aimed at recreating and
studying the properties of the QCD matter under extreme conditions
that existed in the very early universe. Lattice gauge theory has
emerged as the most effective theoretical technique that has provided
us with exciting insights on the properties of the hot QCD matter.
The fluctuations of conserved quantum numbers is an important
observable that gives us information about the underlying degrees of
freedom and the interactions present in the medium. In this talk, I
will discuss about our recent work where we specifically look into the
fluctuations of heavy charm quarks in the hot QCD medium to have a
glimpse of the underlying baryon and meson spectrum made up of charm
for the first time. Using lattice techniques, we determine where these
baryons and mesons melt into quark degrees of freedom as the medium is
heated up, to understand the fundamental properties of QCD as well the
experimental consequences.  In the experiments, one measures the
particle abundances at the "freezeout surface" when the hot soup of
quarks and gluons condense into baryons and mesons. Our study shows
that there are many more experimentally yet to be observed charmed
baryons that needs to be considered to describe the thermodynamics at
the freezeout. I also discuss about extension of our work to another
important experimental observable on freezeout of strange baryons.