The $\rho$ meson in hot hadron matter and low mass dilepton spectra

The structure of the one loop self-energy graphs of the $\rho$ meson is analyzed in the real time formulation of thermal field theory. The modified spectral function of the $\rho$ meson in hot hadronic matter leads to a large enhancement of lepton pair production below the bare peak of the $\rho$. It has been shown that the effective temperature extracted from the inverse slope of the transverse momentum distributions for various invariant mass ($M$) windows of the pair can be used as an efficient tool to characterize different phases of the evolving matter.