Chiral transition and mesonic excitations for quarks with thermal masses

Abstract

We study the effect of a thermal quark mass, mT , on the chiral phase transition and mesonic excitations in the light quark sector at finite temperature in a simple chirally-symmetric model. We show that while nonzero mT lowers the chiral condensate, the chiral transition remains of second order. It is argued that the mesonic excitations have large decay rate at energies below 2mT , owing to the Landau damping of the quarks and the van Hove singularities of the collective modes.