$D_S$ Mesons in Asymmetric Hot and Dense Hadronic Matter

TL;DR

This paper studies how $D_S$ mesons behave in dense, hot, and asymmetric hadronic matter using an extended chiral model, revealing mass drops, degeneracy breaking, and potential experimental implications.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized SU(4) hadronic model to analyze $D_S$ meson interactions and mass modifications in dense media, highlighting effects of strangeness and density.

Findings

$D_S$ mesons experience attractive interactions in dense medium.

Mass degeneracy of $D_S$ mesons is broken in hyperonic medium.

Mass splitting increases with density and strangeness content.

Abstract

The in-medium properties of $D_S$ mesons are investigated within the framework of an effective hadronic model, which is a generalization of a chiral SU(3) model, to SU(4), in order to study the interactions of the charmed hadrons. In the present work, the $D_s$ mesons are observed to experience net attractive interactions in a dense hadronic medium, hence reducing the masses of the $D_S^+$ and $D_S^-$ mesons from the vacuum values. While this conclusion holds in both nuclear and hyperonic media, the magnitude of the mass drop is observed to intensify with the inclusion of strangeness in the medium. Additionally, in hyperonic medium, the mass degeneracy of the $D_S$ mesons is observed to be broken, due to opposite signs of the Weinberg-Tomozawa interaction term in the Lagrangian density. Along with the magnitude of the mass drops, the mass splitting between $D_S^+$ and $D_S^-$ mesons is also observed to grow with an increase in baryonic density and strangeness content of the medium. However, all medium effects analyzed are found to be weakly dependent on isospin asymmetry and temperature. We discuss the possible implications emanating from this analysis, which are all expected to make a significant difference to observables in heavy ion collision experiments, especially the upcoming Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at the future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR), GSI, where matter at high baryonic densities is planned to be produced.