Thermal Pions

Abstract

I discuss the absorption and dispersion of pions in hot matter. A two-loop calculation in the framework of chiral perturbation theory is presented and its result is compactly written in terms of the two- and three-particle forward $\pi \pi$ scattering amplitudes. At modest temperatures, $T \le 100$ MeV, the change in the pion mass is small and its dispersion law closely resembles the free space one. At these temperatures, all quantities of interest are given to a good degree of accuracy by the first term in the virial expansion which is linear in the density. (BUTP-93/16, uses espcrc1.sty from North-Holland Publishing)