Reply Comment on "Meson Masses in Nuclear Matter"

V. L. Eletsky, B. L. Ioffe

Published 1997-04-04Version 1

We reply to the Comment by Hatsuda and Lee on our recent paper "Meson Masses in Nuclear Matter" (Phys.Rev.Lett. 78, 1010, (1997)). We argue that, contrary to the claim in the Comment, the short distance operator product expansion is not applicable for calculation of meson mass shifts in nuclear matter, since they are determined by long distance physics. We also remark that the suggestion made in the Comment that we overlooked in our paper the mean field description of the mass shifts of low-q mesons is perhaps due to a misunderstanding.