Quantitative sum rule analysis of low-temperature spectral functions

Abstract

We analyze QCD and Weinberg-type sum rules in a low-temperature pion gas using vector and axial-vector spectral functions following from the model-independent chiral-mixing scheme. Toward this end we employ recently constructed vacuum spectral functions with ground and first-excited states in both channels and a universal perturbative continuum; they quantitatively describe hadronic tau-decay data and satisfy vacuum sum rules. These features facilitate the implementation of chiral mixing without further assumptions, and lead to in-medium spectral functions which exhibit a mutual tendency of compensating resonance and dip structures, suggestive for an approach toward structureless distributions. In the sum rule analysis, we account for pion mass corrections, which turn out to be significant. While the Weinberg sum rules remain satisfied even at high temperatures, the numerical evaluation of the QCD sum rules for vector and axial-vector channels reveals significant deviations setting in for temperatures beyond ~140 MeV, suggestive of additional physics beyond low-energy chiral pion dynamics.