Dileptons in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

In this review we give an overview about dileptons as probes for the properties of the strongly interacting hot and dense matter created in heavy-ion collisions at various beam energies. As penetrating probes they leave the fireball unaffected from final-state interactions and thus provide a space-time-evolution weighted average of the in-medium properties of hot and dense QCD matter.

Comments: Invited review accepted for publication by The European Physical Journal Special Topics