The balance of attractive and repulsive hadronic interactions: the influence of hadronic spectrum and excluded volume effects on lattice thermodynamics and consequences on experiments

Abstract: Repulsive hadronic interactions play a relevant role in the QCD dynamics, attractive ones being represented by resonance formation. In this study we propose different schemes in order to parameterise repulsive interactions, then being able to extract effective sizes of hadrons from fits to lattice QCD simulations. We find that allowing a difference between the strange and light sectors, strange particles are systematically smaller than light ones with equal mass. The very simple implementation of repulsive interactions would in principle allow to extract precise information about all hadronic species once corresponding lattice observables, sensitive to the species of interest, are provided. With the parameterisation which best reproduces lattice data there is also a good description of experimental yields measured by ALICE and STAR experiments.