Chiral Mesons in Hot Matter

Abstract

We review our recent work on thermal meson properties within the Chiral Perturbation Theory framework. We will focus on the pion electromagnetic form factor, stressing its importance for Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions. We obtain model-independent predictions (based only on chiral symmetry) such as the temperature dependence of the pion electromagnetic charge radius. Imposing unitarity allows to describe the thermal effects of resonances such as the $\rho$ meson.

Proceedings of "Strong and Electroweak Matter 2004", Helsinki, 16-19 June 2004. 5 pages