Excess electron pairs from heavy-ion collisions at CERN and a more complete picture of thermal production

The low-mass dielectron signal from heavy-ion collisions at the CERN--SPS reported by the {\em CERES} collaboration is in excess of estimated hadronic decays suggestive of possible contribution from two-pion annihilation or other hadronic reactions. In the absence of dramatic medium modifications, annihilation alone is unable to account for the data. We explore the role of pion plus resonance scattering [$\pi\rho\to a_{1}(1260) \to \pi e^+e^-$] which has favorable kinematics to populate masses between $2m_{\pi}$ and $m_{\rho}$. While it seems to account for some of the remaining excess beyond annihilation, it fails to allow quantitative interpretation of data.Comment: 11 pages LaTeX, 3 PostScript figure

Dilepton Production in Nucleon-Nucleon Reactions With and Without Hadronic Inelasticities

We calculate elementary proton-proton and neutron-proton bremsstrahlung and their contribution to the $e^+e^-$ invariant mass distribution. At 4.9 GeV, the proton-proton contribution is larger than neutron-proton, but it is small compared to recent data. We then make a first calculation of bremsstrahlung in nucleon-nucleon reactions with multi-hadron final states. Again at 4.9 GeV, the many-body bremsstrahlung is larger than simple nucleon-nucleon bremsstrahlung by more than an order of magnitude in the low-mass region. When the bremsstrahlung contributions are summed with Dalitz decay of the $\eta$, radiative decay of the $\Delta$ and from two-pion annihilation, the result matches recent high statistics proton-proton data from the Dilepton Spectrometer collaboration.Comment: 1+17 pages plus 11 PostScript figures uuencoded and appended, McGill/93-9, TPI-MINN-93/18-

Rate of photon production from hot hadronic matter

Thermal photon emission rates from hot hadronic matter are studied to order $e^{2}g^{4}$, where $g$ indicates a strong-interaction coupling constant. Radiative decay of mesons, Compton and annihilation processes for hadrons, and bremsstrahlung reactions are all considered. Compared to the standard rates from the literature, one finds two orders of magnitude increase for low photon energies stemming mainly from bremsstrahlung and then a modest increase (factor of 2) for intermediate and high energy photons owing to radiative decays for a variety of mesons and from other reactions involving strangeness. These results could have important consequences for electromagnetic radiation studies at RHIC.Comment: 5 pages LaTeX, 4 Postscript figure

Collision broadening of rho meson in a dropping mass scenario

Vector mesons containing light quarks are thought to have their masses reduced in dense nuclear matter, sacrificing some of their energy to the scalar field which becomes appreciable at finite baryon density. Model calculations find masses which fall by a couple tens of percents in normal nuclear matter, and by several hundred MeV in dense matter. We estimate the collision rate for rho mesons in such a scenario and at finite temperature. Compared to its free-mass value, the collision rate changes by nearly a factor of two both above and below, depending on the density. This collision broadening effect could be important for estimates of low-mass dilepton production in heavy-ion collisions.Comment: 8 pages LaTeX, 2 PostScript figure