Search

Dileptons represent a unique probe for nuclear matter under extreme conditions reached in heavy ion collisions. They allow the study of meson properties, like mass and decay width, at various density and temperature regimes. Up to now, in the Tubingen model for dilepton production, modification of meson properties in nuclear medium has been accounted for by allowing a density dependence of the mass (Brown-Rho scaling) together with an ad hoc dependence of the meson decay widths on the same variable. We use the extended vector meson dominance (eVMD) model to extract meson properties in nuclear matter by computing the in-medium meson spectral functions. Dilepton spectra for C+C at 1.0 and 2.0 AGeV are calculated and compared with previous results.

We describe classical spinning particles in external fields. This formalism is extended to spinning particles localized at the ends of open Nambu strings. We consider the relations between the frequencies of spin precession and the energy of spin-orbit splitting.

Low temperature of the phase transition into the quark-gluon plasma correspond to low values of the bag model constant and to absolutely stable strange quark matter. Some of the observed pulsars are identified quite reliably as neutron stars. If strange matter is stable, the central density of these pulsars is to be smaller that critical density of the phase transition into the nonstrange quark matter. The nonstrange quark matter being formed turns to more stable strange matter on a weak interaction timescale converting neutron stars into strange stars. The requirement of stability of old and newly born neutron stars is used to constrain the bag model constant and the critical temperature of the phase transition into the quark-gluon plasma at zero chemical potential.