Density Effects on the Pion Dispersion Relation at Finite Temperature

Abstract

We study the behavior of the pion dispersion relation in a pion medium at finite density and temperature, introducing a chemical potential to describe the finite pion number density. Such description is particularly important during the hadronic phase of a relativistic heavy-ion collision, between chemical and thermal freeze-out, where the pion number changing processes, driven by the strong interaction, can be considered to be frozen. We make use of an effective Lagrangian that explicitly respects chiral symmetry through the enforcement of the chiral Ward identities. The pion dispersion relation is computed through the computation of the pion self-energy in a non-perturbative fashion by giving an approximate solution to the Schwinger-Dyson equation for this self-energy. The dispersion relation is described in terms of a density and temperature dependent mass and an index of refraction which is also temperature, density as well as momentum dependent. The index of refraction is larger than unity for all values of the momentum for finite \mu and T. Given the strong coupling between \rho vectors and pions, we argue that the modification of the pion mass due to finite pion density effects has to be taken into account self-consistently for the description of the in-medium modifications of \rho's.