Are there hadronic bound states above the QCD transition temperature?

Recent lattice QCD calculations, at physical pion masses and small lattice spacings that approach the continuum limit, have revealed that nondiagonal quark correlators above the critical temperature are finite up to about 2 Tc. Since the transition from hadronic to free partonic degrees of freedom is merely an analytic crossover, it is likely that, in the temperature regime between 1--2 Tc, quark and gluon quasiparticles and prehadronic bound states can coexist. The correlator values, in comparison to Polyakov loop-extended Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model calculations beyond mean field, indicate that at least part of the mixed phase resides in color-neutral bound states. A similar effect was postulated for the in-medium fragmentation process, i.e. for partons which do not thermalize with the system and thus constitute the nonequilibrium component of the particle emission spectrum from a deconfined plasma phase. Here, for the first time we investigate the likelihood of forming bound states also in the equilibrated, parton-dominated phase above Tc which is described by lattice QCD.