Comprehensive Interpretation of Thermal Dileptons at the SPS

Abstract

Employing thermal dilepton rates based on medium-modified electromagnetic correlation functions we show that recent dimuon spectra of the NA60 collaboration in central In-In collisions at the CERN-SPS can be understood in terms of radiation from a hot and dense hadronic medium. Earlier calculated ρ-meson spectral functions, as following from hadronic many-body theory, provide an accurate description of the data up to dimuon invariant masses of about M\simeq 0.9 GeV, with good sensitivity to details of the predicted ρ-meson line shape. This, in particular, identifies baryon-induced effects as the prevalent ones. We show that a reliable description of the ρcontribution opens the possibility to study further medium effects: at higher masses (M \simeq 0.9-1.5 GeV) 4-pion type annihilation is required to account for the experimentally observed excess indicating precursor effects of chiral symmetry restoration (``chiral mixing''), while remaining structures in the ωand ϕregion are suggestive for modifications in their line shapes as well.

4 pages, 4 figures, v2: slightly improved estimate of four-pion contributions; accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Lett

References in corpus (1)

• phi photo-production from Li, C, Al, and Cu nuclei at Egamma=1.5 - 2.4 GeV

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