Vector mesons in dense matter and dilepton production in heavy ion collisions at intermediate energies [Elektronische Ressource] / vorgelegt von Elvira Santini

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• Physik

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• Publié par: eberhard_karls_universitat_tubingen
• Publié le: 01 janvier 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 26

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VECTOR MESONS IN DENSE MATTER
AND DILEPTON PRODUCTION
IN HEAVY ION COLLISIONS
AT INTERMEDIATE ENERGIES
DISSERTATION
zur Erlangung des Grades eines
Doktors der Naturwissenschaften
der Fakultät für Mathematik und Physik
der Eberhard–Karls–Universität zu Tübingen
vorgelegt von
ELVIRA SANTINI
aus Catania – Italien
2008Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 15.02.2008
Dekan: Prof. Dr. N. Schopohl
1. Berichterstatter: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. A. Fäßler
2. Berichterstatter: Prof. Dr. C. FuchsConsiderate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.
D. ALIGHIERI, La Divina Commedia, IF XXVI 118-120Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Dileptons and vector mesons: Experimental status 5
2.1 Ultrarelativistic HICs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2 HICs at intermediate energies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.3 Reactions with elementary projectiles on nuclei . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3 Elementary sources for dilepton production 9
3.1 Dilepton decay rates of light pseudoscalar mesons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
′ ∗ ′ + −3.1.1 Relation between the decaysM→M andM→Mℓ ℓ . . . . . 10
0 + − + −3.1.2 Decay modes → e e and → ℓ ℓ . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
+ −3.2 Decays of the -, -, and -mesons toℓ ℓ pairs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.3 Dilepton decay rates of nucleon resonances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
∗3.3.1 The N→ R helicity amplitudes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
3.3.2 Extended VMD model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
4 Vector mesons in the medium 31
4.1 In-medium spectral functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
4.2 In-medium self energy: resonant contribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
4.2.1 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
4.3 In-medium self energy: non-resonant contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
4.3.1 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
4.4 In-medium resonances: role of self-consistency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
4.5 Dropping mass scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
5 Dilepton production in HIC 47
5.1 The QMD transport model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
5.1.1 Basic structure of QMD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
5.2 Tübingen RQMD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
5.3 Dileptons within the Tübingen RQMD model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
5.3.1 Dilepton decays of light mesons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
5.3.2 Dilepton decays of nucleon resonances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
5.3.3 Discussion: Nucleon-Nucleon Bremsstrahlung . . . . . . . . . . . 59
5.3.4 Numerical realization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
ghwgfprggII CONTENTS
5.3.5 Implementation of the and meson in-medium spectral functions 63
5.3.6 Advantages and disadvantages of the present approach . . . . . . . 65
5.4 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
6 Summary and Conclusions 79
A Notation 81
∗ + −B The →ℓ ℓ decay width 85
C Non-resonant contributions to the forward V N scattering 89
C.1 The Compton-like contribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
C.1.1 meson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
C.1.2 meson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
C.2 The -exchange contribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Bibliography 100
Zusammenfassung 115
Acknowledgments 119
rgwsrwChapter 1
Introduction
In the last two decades substantial experimental and theoretical efforts have been directed
to the investigation of the modification of the hadron properties in dense and hot matter.
The interest has been triggered by the expectation that a signature of the restoration of the
spontaneously broken chiral symmetry at finite density and temperature could be inferred
by performing and analyzing appropriate experiments. It is expected that the chiral phase
transition would manifest itself in terms of certain changes of the hadron properties. In par-
ticular, the relation between medium modification of the hadron masses and chiral symmetry
restoration in finite density and high temperature matter has been discussed for a long time.
The scalar quark condensate, which due to the spontaneous breaking of the chiral symmetry
develops a non-zero value in vacuum, is predicted to decrease with increasing density and
temperature [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Linking the in-medium modification of the hadron masses
directly to the change of the two-quark scalar condensate, one would expect a similar de-
crease of the hadron masses with increasing density and temperature. The prediction of a
dropping of the hadron masses in the nuclear medium driven by the scalar condensate has
been formulated in [7] and stimulated the search for signatures of modified hadron proper-
ties in different kinds of nuclear reactions. Heavy Ion Collision (HIC) experiments, offering
the unique opportunity to investigate the hadron properties at supra-normal densities and
high temperature, as well as experiments with elementary projectiles on normal nuclei, due
to the expectation that signatures should be already visible at normal matter density, have
been involved. Among the hadrons, the attention has particularly focused on the light vec-
tor mesons, since their direct decay to a dilepton pair offers the possibility to “detect” the
in-medium properties of hadrons using a clean probe. Dileptons, and in general electro-
magnetic probes, have the advantage that, once produced from the vector meson decay, they
leave the reaction zone essentially undistorted by final state interactions and hence carry an
undistorted signal of the properties owned by the vector meson in the moment of its decay.
On the other side, the in-medium modification of the spectral properties of the vector
mesons has been extensively investigated also in the context of hadronic models [8, 9, 10,
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19]. Many-body correlations typically induce a significant
reduction of the meson life time and thus its melting in the nuclear environment.
The connection between hadron properties and their in-medium modification on the one
hand and the in-medium change of the non-perturbative quark and gluon condensates on the2 Introduction
other hand is not trivial. One approach which aims to establish this connection is the QCD
sum rule approach. An early analysis based on QCD sum rules performed by Hatsuda and
Lee [20] had supported the conjecture of a dropping of the vector meson masses at finite
density made by Brown and Rho [7]. However, the analysis had been performed making the
strong assumption that the vector mesons would have zero width in medium. Later it was
pointed out [21] that the sum rule approach has only limited predictive power with respect
to the specific properties of the hadrons, like their masses or their widths, since it constrains
certain integrals over the spectral distribution of the hadron and does not directly constrain
the hadron mass and the hadron width separately. Rather, it gives a possible “surface” of
allowed values in the mass/width plane. In the case of the meson, for example, a sum
rule analysis predicts that in nuclear matter the meson spectral strength is shifted to lower
invariant masses. However, it is not possible to deduce only from the sum rule analysis
whether the additional strength is due to a dropping of the mass or to a collisional broadening.
The first experimental observations of the modification of the meson spectral properties
in hot and dense matter trace back to the nineties, when dilepton spectra in ultrarelativistic
heavy ion collisions have been measured by the CERES [22] and HELIOS [23] collabora-
tions at CERN. The dilepton spectra showed a considerable enhancement over the hadronic
cocktail in the region below the vector meson peak, which suggested the general moving of
spectral strength downward to smaller invariant masses. Whether the presence of spectral
strength at lower masses was connected to a dropping of the masses, as predicted in [7, 20],
or to a spreading of the spectral function driven by the collisional broadening, as expected
from hadronic model calculations [24], could not be clarified by the comparison with the ex-
perimental data, mainly due to the low mass resolution of the data in the region of the vector
meson peak. Recent higher resolution measurements of dilepton spectra in heavy ion colli-
sions performed by the NA60 collaboration [25] and the CERES collaboration [26] seem to
favor an in-medium broadening of the meson over a mass shift.
A second set of heavy ion experiments have been performed at lower laboratory energies
(1.0 AGeV) by the DLS collaboration at BEVALAC [27, 28]. Also in this case the low mass
region of the dilepton spectra was underestimated by transport calculations, in contrast to
similar measurements for the p+p and p+d systems. As opposed to the ultrarelativistic case,
the situation did not improve when the in-medium spectral functions or the dropping mass
scenario were taken into account [29, 30, 31]. However, in this energy regime which probes