We present a combined analysis of the in-medium behavior of ρ and ω mesons within the Borel QCD sum rule taking into account finite widths.
IntroductionThe experiments at the High-Acceptance Di-Electron Spectrometer HADES [1] are aimed at verifying predictions of the behavior of light vector mesons in nuclear matter. Due to the decay channel V → e + e − a measurement of the escaping di-electrons can reveal directly the properties of the parent mesons, V = ρ, ω, · · ·, since the interaction probability of the e ± with the ambient strongly interacting medium is small.In relativistic heavy-ion collisions temperature effects play an important role, which also cause a change of the properties of vector mesons. Indeed, the experiments of the CERES collaboration at the CERN-SPS [2] can only be explained by assuming strong medium effects, in particular for the ρ meson (cf. [3,4] and further references therein). This seems to be confirmed at higher beam energies, as delivered by the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, since the ρ meson, as measured via the π + π − decay channel, suffers some modification [5]. In contrast, in heavy-ion collisions at typical SIS18 energies, i.e., at beam energies around 1 AGeV, the in-medium behavior of vector mesons in compressed nuclear matter can be studied, where temperature effects are small and may be neglected. Complementary to heavy-ion collisions one can seek for in-medium modifications in reactions of hadronic projectiles [6] or real and virtual photons [7] at nuclei, as already at nuclear saturation density sizeable modifications of vector mesons are predicted.There exists a vastly extended literature on the in-medium modification of hadrons. We mention here only the Brown-Rho scaling hypothesis, according to which a mass shift of a vector meson is directly interrelated to a change of the chiral condensate [8], and the vector manifestation [9], the effective Lagrangian approach [10], purely hadronic approaches [11,12], and QCD sum rules [13,14,15,16]. QCD sum rules [17] follow the idea of duality (cf. [18]) by relating quantities expressed by partonic (quark and gluon) degrees of freedom with hadronic observables. We take here the attitude to assume that the partonic quantities are given and examine the QCD sum rule to elucidate the in-medium change of the ρ and ω meson on a common footing. The corresponding current operators, expressed by the interpolating quark field operators u and d have the form J ρ µ = 1 2 (ūγ µ u−dγ µ d) and J ω µ = 1 2 (ūγ µ u+dγ µ d), * Dedicated to the memory of O.P. Pavlenko