A Hidden Local Field Theory Description of Dileptons in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

Using the notion of “hadronic freedom” inferred from the vector manifestation of hidden local symmetry we argue that, contrary to the commonly held belief, the dileptons measured in relativistic heavy-ion collisions do not carry useful information directly relevant to the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry and hence to the mechanism for mass generation of light-quark hadrons. The dileptons emitted from those vector mesons whose masses are shifted by the vacuum change in temperature and/or density are strongly suppressed in the hadronic free region between the chiral restoration point and the “flash point” at which the vector mesons recover ∼ > 90% of their free-space on-shell masses and the full strong coupling strength. The spectral function deduced from the dilepton measurements reflects predominantly those vector mesons decaying at the “flash temperature” Tflash ∼ 120 MeV. Thus, only the ρ on-shell spectral function can be reconstructed, and the dileptons measured at invariant masses below the free ρ peak come mostly from the large number of pions interacting strongly and having nothing to do with medium effects of chiral symmetry.