Van Hove singularities in high-temperature QCD

by M. THOMA (CERN)

Thursday 12 Oct 2000, 14:00 → 16:30 Europe/Zurich

TH Auditorium (CERN)

In the present talk I argue that the most general ansatz for the quark propagator at finite temperature leads to a quark dispersion relation, which shows two branches, of which one branch, the so-called plasmino, has a minimum at non-vanishing momentum. This causes Van Hove singularities in observable, such as the lepton-pair production from a quark-gluon plasma and hadronic correlators in the deconfined phase. Using arguments based on lattice QCD as well as two different approximations for the thermal quark propagator I discuss the prospects of observing Van Hove singularities in the lepton-pair production as a unique signature for the quark-gluon plasma formation.