Thermal modification of open heavy-flavor mesons from an effective hadronic theory

We have developed a self-consistent theoretical approach to study the modification of the properties of heavy mesons in hot mesonic matter which takes into account chiral and heavy-quark spin-flavor symmetries. The heavylight meson-meson unitarized scattering amplitudes in coupled channels incorporate thermal corrections by using the imaginary-time formalism, as well as the dressing of the heavy mesons with the self-energies. We report our results for the ground-state thermal spectral functions and the implications for the excited mesonic states generated dynamically in the heavy-light molecular model. We have applied these to the calculation of meson Euclidean correlators and transport coefficients for D mesons and summarize here our findings.