Speaker
Description
It is currently still not established how the phi meson mass and decay width behave in a dense
environment such as nuclear matter. In this talk, the status of recent theoretical research related
to the properties of the phi meson in nuclear matter is reviewed, with a focus on observables
measured at the KEK E325, J-PARC E16 and E88 experiments, including dilepton and K+K-
decay modes and their angular distributions. The relation of these observables to fundamental
properties of nuclear matter, such as chiral symmetry, its partial restoration, in-medium Lorentz
symmetry violation and the resultant modification of its dispersion relation, will be discussed.
Recent results of a collaboration between theorists and experimentalists, with the goal of
simulating proton-nucleus reactions to produce phi mesons in nuclei, will also be presented.