Charge fluctuations and electric mass in a hot meson gas

Net charge fluctuations in a hadron gas are studied using an effective hadronic interaction. The emphasis of this work is to investigate the corrections of hadronic interactions to the charge fluctuations of a noninteracting resonance gas. Several methods such as loop, density, and virial expansions are employed. The calculations are also extended to SU(3), and some resummation schemes are considered. Although the various corrections are sizable individually, they cancel to a large extent. As a consequence, we find that charge fluctuations are rather well described by the free resonance gas.