QCD sum rules for rho mesons in vacuum and in-medium, re-examined

Abstract

An updated investigation of QCD sum rules for the first two moments of rho meson spectral functions, both in vacuum and in-medium, is performed with emphasis on the role of the scale related to spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in QCD. It is demonstrated that these lowest moments of vector current spectral distributions do permit an accurate sum rule analysis with controlled input including QCD condensates of the lowest dimensions, whereas higher moments are subject to uncertainties from higher dimensional condensates. Possible connections with Brown-Rho scaling are discussed. The factorization approximation for four-quark condensates is shown not to be applicable in any of the cases studied.