Probing in-medium vector meson decays by double-differential di-electron spectra in heavy-ion collisions at SIS energies

Abstract

Within a transport code simulation for heavy-ion collisions at bombarding energies around 1 AGeV, we demonstrate that double-differential di-electron spectra with suitable kinematical cuts are useful to isolate (i) the $\rho$ meson peak even in case of strong broadening, and (ii) the in-medium $\omega$ decay contribution. The expected in-medium modifications of the vector meson spectral densities can thus be probed in this energy range via the di-electron channel.