  We study the effect of a thermal quark mass, m_T, on the chiral phase
transition and mesonic excitations in the light quark sector at finite
temperature in a simple chirally-symmetric model. We show that while nonzero
m_T lowers the chiral condensate, the chiral transition remains of second
order. It is argued that the mesonic excitations have large decay rate at
energies below 2m_T, owing to the Landau damping of the quarks and the van Hove
singularities of the collective modes.

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology