PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

We use Lattice QCD calculations of fluctuations and correlations of variousconserved charges to show that the deconfinement of strangeness takes place inthe chiral crossover region of QCD; however, inside the quark-gluon plasmastrange quarks remain strongly interacting at least up to temperatures twicethe QCD crossover temperature. Further, we discuss how the freeze-outparameters of heavy-ion collisions can be determined in a model-independent waythrough direct comparisons between experimentally measured higher ordercumulants of conserved charges and corresponding Lattice QCD calculations.Utilizing the preliminary data from the STAR and PHENIX experiments weillustrate this method. Although, the Lattice QCD based determinations of thefreeze-out parameters utilizing data sets of different experiments anddifferent observables are currently not consistent with each other, it istantalizing to see that all the observed freeze-out parameters lie very closeto the chiral/deconfinement crossover region of QCD.