Electromagnetic mass difference of pions at low temperature

Abstract

We compute low temperature corrections to the electromagnetic mass difference of pions in the chiral limit. The computation is done in a model independent way in the framework of chiral perturbation theory, using the background field method and the hard thermal loop approximation. We also generalize at low temperature the sum rule of Das et al. We find that the mass difference between the charged and neutral pions decreases at low temperature $T$ with respect to the T=0 value. This is so in spite of the fact that charged particles always get a thermal correction to their masses of order $\sim eT$, where $e$ is the gauge coupling constant. Our result can be understood as a consequence of the tendency towards chiral symmetry restoration at finite temperature.