Abstract
We study the temperature dependence of the pseudoscalar meson properties in a relativistic bound-state approach exhibiting the chiral behavior mandated by QCD. Concretely, we adopt the Dyson-Schwinger approach with a rank-2 separable model interaction. After extending the model to the strange sector and fixing its parameters at zero temperature, , we study the dependence of the masses and decay constants of all ground-state mesons in the pseudoscalar nonet. Of chief interest are and . The influence of the QCD axial anomaly on them is successfully obtained through the Witten-Veneziano relation at . The same approach is then extended to , using lattice QCD results for the topological susceptibility. The most conspicuous finding is an increase of the mass around the chiral restoration temperature , which would suggest a suppression of production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The increase of the mass may also indicate that the extension of the Witten-Veneziano relation to finite temperatures becomes unreliable around and above . Possibilities of an improved treatment are discussed.
2 More- Received 10 August 2007
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.76.096009
©2007 American Physical Society