Influence of In-Medium Properties of Vector Mesons on Dilepton Production in Heavy Ion Collisions at SIS Energies

Abstract

Dileptons represent a unique probe for nuclear matter under extreme conditions reached in heavy ion collisions. They allow the study of meson properties, like mass and decay width, at various density and temperature regimes. Up to now, in the Tubingen model for dilepton production, modification of meson properties in nuclear medium has been accounted for by allowing a density dependence of the mass (Brown-Rho scaling) together with an ad hoc dependence of the meson decay widths on the same variable. We use the extended vector meson dominance (eVMD) model to extract meson properties in nuclear matter by computing the in-medium meson spectral functions. Dilepton spectra for C+C at 1.0 and 2.0 AGeV are calculated and compared with previous results.