Missing baryonic resonances in the Hagedorn spectrum

The hadronic medium of QCD is modeled as a gas of point-like hadrons, with its composition determined by the Hagedorn mass spectrum. The spectrum consists of a discrete and a continuous part. The former is determined by the experimentally confirmed resonances tabulated by the Particle Data Group (PDG), while the latter can be extracted from the existing lattice data. This formulation of the hadron resonance gas (HRG) provides a transparent framework to relate the fluctuation of conserved charges as calculated in the lattice QCD approach to the particle content of the medium. A comparison of the two approaches shows that the equation of state is well described by the standard HRG model, which includes only a discrete spectrum of known hadrons. The corresponding description in the strange sector, however, shows clear discrepancies, thus a continuous spectrum is added to incorporate the effect of missing resonances. We propose a method to extract the strange-baryon spectrum from the lattice data. The result is consistent with the trend set by the unconfirmed strange baryons resonances listed by the PDG, suggesting that most of the missing interaction strength for the strange baryons reside in the vertical bar S vertical bar = 1 sector. This scenario is also supported by recent lattice calculations, and might be important in the energy region covered by the NICA accelerator in Dubna, where in the heavy-ion collisions, baryons are the dominating degrees of freedom in the final state.