Effect of in-medium spectral density of D and D⁎ mesons on the J/ψ dissociation in hadronic matter

The one-loop self-energy of the D and D⁎ mesons in a hot hadronic medium is evaluated using the real time formalism of thermal field theory. The interaction of the heavy open-charm mesons with the thermalized constituents (π,K,η) of the hadronic matter is treated in the covariant formalism of heavy meson chiral perturbation theory. The imaginary parts are extracted from the discontinuities of the self-energy function across the unitary and the Landau cuts. The non-zero contribution from the latter to the spectral density of D and D⁎ mesons opens a number of subthreshold decay channels of the J/ψ leading to a significant increase in the dissociation width in hadronic matter