Chiral partners and their electromagnetic radiation (Ingredients for a systematic in-medium calculation)

It is argued that the chiral partners of the lowest-lying hadrons are hadronic molecules and not three-quark or quark-antiquark states, respectively. As an example the case of a₁ as the chiral partner of the ρ is discussed. Deconfinement-or as a precursor large in-medium widths for hadronic states-is proposed as a natural way to accommodate for the fact that at chiral restoration the respective in-medium spectra of chiral partners must become degenerate. Ingredients for a systematic and self-consistent in-medium calculation are presented with special emphasis on vector-meson dominance which emerges from a recently proposed systematic counting scheme for the mesonic sector including pseudoscalar and vector mesons as active degrees of freedom.