Measuring hadron properties at finite temperature

Abstract

We estimate the numbers and mass spectra of observed lepton and kaon pairs produced from $\varphi$ meson decays in the central rapidity region of an Au+Au collision at lab energy 11.6 GeV/nucleon. The following effects are considered: possible mass shifts, thermal broadening due to collisions with hadronic resonances, and superheating of the resonance gas. Changes in the dilepton mass spectrum may be seen, but changes in the dikaon spectrum are too small to be detectable.

Comments: 9 pages (revtex), 3 figures (uuencoded postscript)