$\rho$-Meson Production and Decay in Proton-Nucleus Collisions

Abstract

We analyze the production of $\rho$-mesons in $p+A$ reactions including both the production by proton-nucleon as well as pion-nucleon collisions within a coupled channel transport approach. The final state interactions of the $\rho$-meson with nucleons are evaluated from a resonance model which allows to extract elastic and inelastic cross sections. We include the latter final state interactions, the $\rho$-meson decay into two pions as well as the final pion-nucleon interactions within the transport approach. We find the invariant mass distribution of pion pairs to be sensitive to the $\rho$-meson properties in the nuclear medium. However, due to the strong final state interactions of pions only light targets like ${}^{12}C$ might be suited to extract a $\rho$-signal from the uncorrelated two pion background which carries information about the in-medium properties of the $\rho$-meson.

27 pages, LaTeX, including 13 ps-figures, UGI-97-20, Nucl. Phys. A., in press

References in corpus (5)

• Rho Meson Propagation and Dilepton Enhancement in Hot Hadronic Matter
• P-Wave Polarization of the $\rho$-Meson and the Dilepton Spectrum in Dense Matter
• Analysis of Kaon Production at SIS Energies
• Rho-meson mass in light nuclei
• Medium effects in the production and decay of $\omega$- and $\rho$-resonances in pion-nucleus interactions

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Dilepton production and $m_T$-scaling at BEVALAC/SIS energies
• Antikaon Production in Proton-Nucleus Reactions and the $K^{-}$ properties in nuclear matter
• Possible studies at the first stage of the NICA collider operation with polarized and unpolarized proton and deuteron beams
• Conceptual design of the Spin Physics Detector
• Seeing phi meson through the dilepton spectra in heavy-ion collisions
• Studying the $\omega$ properties in pA collisions via the $\omega \to {\pi }^0\gamma$ decay
• In-medium modification of $\rho$-mesons produced in heavy ion collisions
• Transport analysis of in-medium hadron effects in pA and AA collisions