| Summary: | In this master’s thesis the width of the <img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?%5Ceta'" /> meson is studied as a function of temperature. We consider a background medium consisting of a pion gas and assume a vanishing net baryon chemical potential. The width is obtained in the framework of large <img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?N_%7Bc%7D" /> chiral perturbation theory and we consider terms up to next-to-leading order in the effective Lagrangian. We use a low-density approximation to calculate the width increase due to scattering with pions from the heat bath. The results suggest that the in-medium width for the <img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?%5Ceta'" /> may become of considerable size: at a temperature <img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?T%5Capprox%2075" /> MeV we find a width increase of <img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?%5CDelta%5CGamma%5Capprox%203-4" /> MeV, comparable to the inverse lifetime of the fireball created in a heavy-ion collision. The <img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?%5Ceta'" /> is of particular interested since it is intimately connected to the <img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?U(1)_%7BA%7D" /> anomaly of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). It has been speculated that <img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?U(1)_%7BA%7D" /> may become a symmetry of QCD at high temperatures and studies of the <img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?%5Ceta'" /> could indicate if that is the case. Depending on for how large temperatures the results from large <img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?N_%7Bc%7D" /> can be trusted, they indicate that the <img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?%5Ceta'" /> may be possible to study experimentally in heavy-ion collisions due to its sizable in-medium width.
|
|---|
