Properties of heavy mesons at finite temperature

TL;DR

This paper investigates how heavy mesons' masses and widths change in a hot pionic medium using a unitarized hadronic approach, providing insights into their behavior at finite temperature and comparing with future lattice QCD results.

Contribution

It introduces a self-consistent unitarized model for heavy mesons at finite temperature, incorporating chiral and heavy-quark symmetries, and predicts temperature-dependent modifications of meson properties.

Findings

Charmed meson masses decrease at finite temperature.

Mesons acquire a substantial width in a hot medium.

Excited mesonic states are significantly affected by temperature.

Abstract

We study the properties of heavy mesons using a unitarized approach in a hot pionic medium, based on an effective hadronic theory. The interaction between the heavy mesons and pseudoscalar Goldstone bosons is described by a chiral Lagrangian at next-to-leading order in the chiral expansion and leading order in the heavy-quark mass expansion so as to satisfy heavy-quark spin symmetry. The meson-meson scattering problem in coupled channels with finite-temperature corrections is solved in a self-consistent manner. Our results show that the masses of the ground-state charmed mesons $D(0^-)$ and $D_s(1^-)$ decrease in a pionic environment at $T\neq 0$ and they acquire a substantial width. As a consequence, the behaviour of excited mesonic states (i.e. $D_{s0}^*(2317)^\pm$ and $D_0^*(2300)^{0,\pm}$), generated dynamically in our heavy-light molecular model, is also modified at $T\neq 0$. The aim is to test our results against Lattice QCD calculations in the future.