General structure of the neutral $ρ$ meson self-energy and its spectral properties in a hot and dense magnetized medium

Abstract: The one loop self energy of the neutral $\rho$ meson is obtained for the effective $\rho\pi\pi$ and $\rho NN$ interaction at finite temperature and density in the presence of a constant background magnetic field of arbitrary strength. In our approach, the eB-dependent vacuum part of the self energy is extracted by means of dimensional regularization where the ultraviolet divergences corresponding to the pure vacuum self energy manifest as the pole singularities of gamma as well as Hurwitz zeta functions. This improved regularization procedure consistently reproduces the expected results in the vanishing magnetic field limit and can be used quite generally in other self energy calculations dealing with arbitrary magnetic field strength. In presence of the external magnetic field, the general Lorentz structure for the in-medium vector boson self energy is derived which can also be implemented in case of the gauge bosons such as photons and gluons. It has been shown that with vanishing perpendicular momentum of the external particle, essentially two form factors are sufficient to describe the self energy completely. Consequently, two distinct modes are observed in the study of the effective mass, dispersion relations and the spectral function of $\rho^0$ where one of the modes possesses two fold degeneracy. For large baryonic chemical potential, it is observed that the critical magnetic field required to block the $\rho^0\rightarrow\pi^+\pi^-$ decay channel increases significantly with temperature. However, in case of smaller values reaching down to vanishing chemical potential, the critical field follows the opposite trend.