Can Van Hove singularities be observed in relativistic heavy-ion collisions ?

Abstract

Based on general arguments the in-medium quark propagator in a quark-gluon plasma leads to a quark dispersion relation consisting of two branches, of which one exhibits a minimum at some finite momentum. This results in a vanishing group velocity for collective quark modes. Important quantities such as the production rate of low mass lepton pairs and mesonic correlators depend inversely on this group velocity. Therefore these quantities, which follow from self energy diagrams containing a quark loop, are strongly affected by Van Hove singularities (peaks and gaps). If these sharp structures could be observed in relativistic heavy-ion collisions it would reveal the physical picture of the QGP as a gas of quasiparticles.

12 pages including nine figures and style files, invited talk given at the ICPAQGP-2001, November 26-30, 2001, Jaipur, India

References in corpus (5)

• Finite Temperature Meson Correlation Functions in HTL Approximation
• Quark Dispersion Relation and Dilepton Production in the Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Gluon condensate, quark propagation, and dilepton production in the quark-gluon plasma
• Gluon Condensate and Non-Perturbative Quark-Photon Vertex
• Van Hove Singularities in the Quark-Gluon Plasma

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