Suppression of Dilepton Production in Hot Hadronic Matter

Abstract

Dilepton production from pion-pion annihilation in a hot hadronic matter is studied using an effective chiral Lagrangian that includes explicitly vector mesons. We find that the production rate for dileptons with invariant masses around the rho-meson resonance is suppressed as a result of the modification of the pion electromagnetic form factor at finite temperature. The relevance of this phenomenon to the partial restoration of chiral symmetry in hot hadronic matter is discussed.