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Arnaldi, R; Averbeck, R; Banicz, K; Castor, J; Chaurand, B; Cicalò, C; Colla, A; Cortese, P; Damjanovic, S; David, A; De Falco, A; Devaux, A; Drees, A; Ducroux, L; En'yo, H; Fargeix, J; Ferretti, A; Floris, M; Förster, A; Force, P; Guettet, N; Guichard, A; Gulkanian, H; Heuser, J M; Keil, M; Kluberg, L; Lourenço, C; Lozano, J; Manso, F; Masoni, A; Martins, P; Neves, A; Ohnishi, H; Oppedisano, C; Parracho, P; Pillot, Ph; Puddu, G; Radermacher, E; Ramalhete, P; Rosinsky, P; Scomparin, E; Seixas, J; Serci, S; Shahoyan, R; Sonderegger, P; Specht, H J; Tieulent, R; Usai, G; Veenhof, R; Wöhri, H K
Physical review letters, 04/2006, Volume: 96, Issue: 16Journal Article
We report on a precision measurement of low-mass muon pairs in 158 AGeV indium-indium collisions at the CERN SPS. A significant excess of pairs is observed above the yield expected from neutral meson decays. The unprecedented sample size of 360,000 dimuons and the good mass resolution of about 2% allow us to isolate the excess by subtraction of the decay sources. The shape of the resulting mass spectrum is consistent with a dominant contribution from pi+pi- -->rho -->mu+mu- annihilation. The associated space-time averaged spectral function shows a strong broadening, but essentially no shift in mass. This may rule out theoretical models linking hadron masses directly to the chiral condensate.
