Modeling thermal dilepton radiation for SIS experiments

Dileptons are radiated during the whole time evolution of a heavy-ion collision and leave the interaction zone unaffected. Thus they carry valuable information about the hot and dense medium created in those collisions to the detector. Realistic dilepton emission rates and an accurate description of the fireball's space-time evolution are needed to properly describe the contribution of in-medium signals to the dilepton invariant mass spectrum. In this presentation we demonstrate how this can be achieved at SIS collision energies. The framework is implemented into the event generator Pluto which is used by the HADES and CBM experiments to produce their hadronic freeze-out cocktails. With the help of an coarse-graining approach to model the fireball evolution and pertinent dilepton rates via a parametrization of the Rapp-Wambach in-medium ρ meson spectral function, the thermal contribution to the spectrum can be calculated. The results also enable us to get an estimate of the fireball lifetime at SIS18 energies.