Charge fluctuations and electric mass in a hot meson gas

Abstract

Net-Charge fluctuations in a hadron gas are studied using an effective hadronic interaction. The emphasis of this work is to investigate the corrections of hadronic interactions to the charge fluctuations of a non-interacting resonance gas. Several methods, such as loop, density and virial expansions are employed. The calculations are also extended to SU(3) and some resummation schemes are considered. Although the various corrections are sizable individually, they cancel to a large extent. As a consequence we find that charge fluctuations are rather well described by the free resonance gas.