Electromagnetic probes of hot and dense hadronic matter

Abstract

The formalism of photon and dilepton productions in a thermal bath are discussed in the frame work of finite temperature field theory. The emission rate has been expressed in terms of the discontinuities or imaginary part of the photon self energy in the thermal bath. The photon and dilepton emissions have been computed by taking into account the in-medium modifications of the particles appearing in the internal loop of the self energy diagram using a phenomenological effective lagrangian approach. The results has been compared with the photon spectra measured by WA 98 collaboration at CERN SPS energies.