Chiral transition and mesonic excitations for quarks with thermal masses

Abstract

We study the effect of a thermal quark mass, ${m}_{T}$, on the chiral phase transition and mesonic excitations in the light quark sector at finite temperature in a simple chirally symmetric model. We show that, while nonzero ${m}_{T}$ lowers the chiral condensate, the chiral transition remains of second order. It is argued that the mesonic excitations have a large decay rate at energies below $2{m}_{T}$, owing to the Landau damping of the quarks and the van Hove singularities of the collective modes.