Production and in-medium modification of mesons in proton-nucleus reactions from a transport approach

Gubler, P. ; Ichikawa, Masaya; Song, T.*; Bratkovskaya, E.*

Production and in-medium modification of hidden strange mesons are studied in proton-nucleus reactions: p+C, p+Cu, and p+Pb at 12 GeV/c, partially measured by the KEK E325 Collaboration via the dilepton decay mode. This work is based on the off-shell microscopic parton-hadron-string dynamics transport approach, and especially makes it possible to simulate in-medium off-shell dynamics of the meson in the reactions studied. Different in-medium scenarios for the modification of the meson spectral function in nuclear matter are investigated: (i) dropping pole mass, (ii) collisional broadening, and (iii) simultaneous dropping pole mass and collisional broadening. Even though the meson production in p+A reactions occurs only at densities around or below normal nuclear matter density , we find visible modifications of the generated dilepton spectra for the in-medium scenarios compared to the vacuum distribution.