Mesons, baryons and the confinement/deconfinement transition

We identify an observable that operates as a probe of the quark versus hadron content of a bath of quarks and gluons at finite temperature and chemical potential. To this purpose, we relate the Polyakov and anti-Polyakov loops, which determine how energetically costly it is to bring an external static quark or antiquark probe into the thermal bath, to the ability of that medium to provide the conditions for the formation of meson-like or baryon-like configurations that would screen the probes.