Dileptons and Medium Effects in Heavy-Ion Collisions

Abstract

We discuss the status of calculating in-medium modifications of vector-meson spectral functions in hot and dense matter, their application to dilepton spectra in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions, and possible relations to chiral symmetry restoration. We emphasize the importance of constraining in-medium spectral functions by empirical information from scattering data, QCD sum rules, and lattice QCD. This is a mandatory prerequisite to arrive at reliable predictions for low-mass dileptons in heavy-ion collisions.