Fate of the $\rho$-$a_1$ mixing in dilepton production

Abstract

We investigate the effect of chiral mixing on dilepton production by combining the in-medium spectral function in the chiral effective field theory with the state-of-the-art fluid dynamical simulations. We compare the spectral functions with different chiral symmetry restoration scenarios. We find that the scenario with proper chiral symmetry restoration that takes into account the degenerate $\rho$ and $a_1$ mesons leads to an increase of the yield in the window of $1.1<M<1.4$ GeV. Whereas, the low-temperature theorem of chiral mixing extrapolated toward a chiral crossover, often used in the literature, leads to a substantial overestimate at $M=1.2$ GeV.