Medium modifications of the rho meson in nuclear photoproduction

Abstract

We extend our recent study of dilepton invariant-mass spectra from the decays of rho mesons produced by photon reactions off nuclei. We specifically focus on experimental spectra as recently measured by the CLAS Collaboration at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility using carbon and iron nuclei. Building on our earlier work, we broaden our description to a larger set of observables to identify sensitivities to the medium effects predicted by microscopic calculations of the rho spectral function. We compute mass spectra for several target nuclei and study the spectral shape as a function of the three-momentum of the outgoing lepton pair. We also compute the so-called nuclear transparency ratio, which provides an alternative means (and thus consistency check) of estimating the rho width in the cold nuclear medium.