In-medium vector meson properties and low-mass dilepton production from hot hadronic matter

The in-medium properties of the vector mesons are known to be modified significantly in hot and dense hadronic matter due to vacuum polarization effects from the baryon sector in the Walecka model. The vector meson mass drops significantly in the medium due to the effects of the Dirac sea. In the variational approach adopted in the present paper, these effects are taken into account through a realignment of the ground state with baryon condensates. Such a realignment of the ground state becomes equivalent to summing of the baryonic tadpole diagrams in the relativistic Hartree approximation (RHA). The approximation scheme adopted here goes beyond RHA to include quantum effects from the scalar meson and is nonperturbative and self-consistent. It includes multiloop effects, thus corresponding to a different approximation as compared to the one loop approximation of including scalar field quantum corrections. In the present work, we study the properties of the vector mesons in the hot and dense matter as modified due to such quantum correction effects from the baryon as well as scalar meson sectors. These medium modifications of the properties of the vector mesons are reflected, through the shifting and broadening of the respective peaks, in the low mass dilepton spectra. There is broadening of the peaks due to corrections from scalar meson quantum effects as compared to the relativistic Hartree approximation. It is seen to be rather prominent for the $\omega$ meson in the invariant mass plot.