Cherenkov and Fano effects at the origin of asymmetric vector mesons in nuclear media

Abstract

It is argued that the experimentally observed phenomenon of asymmetric vector mesons produced in nuclear media during high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions can be explained as Cherenkov and Fano effects. The mass distributions of lepton pairs created at meson decays decline from the traditional Breit-Wigner shape in the low-mass wing of the resonance. That is explained by the positive real part of the amplitude in this wing for classic Cherenkov treatment and further detalized in quantum mechanics as the interference of direct and continuum states in Fano effect. The corresponding parameters are found from the comparison with rho-meson data and admit reasonable explanation.