Cottingham formula and the pion electromagnetic mass difference at finite temperature

Abstract

We generalize the Cottingham formula at finite (T\neq 0) temperature by using the imaginary time formalism. The Cottingham formula gives the theoretical framework to compute the electromagnetic mass differences of the hadrons using a dispersion relation approach. It can be also used in other contexts, such as non leptonic weak decays, and its generalization to finite temperature might be useful in evaluating thermal effects in these processes. As an application we compute the \pi^+-\pi^0 mass difference at T\neq 0; at small T we reproduce the behaviour found by other authors: \delta m^2(T)= \delta m^2(0)+\mathcal{O}(\alpha T^2), while for moderate T, near the deconfinement temperature, we observe deviations from this behaviour.