In the first part of this thesis the in-medium properties of the rho meson in hot and dense matter are investigated. The main focus lies on the modifications of the selfenergy due to the coupling of the rho meson to in-medium pions. The calculation treats the full momentum dependence in a gauge invariant way. As a function of nucleon density, the rho meson spectral function is strongly enhanced in the invariant mass region below 650 MeV, while the maximum, i.e. the pole mass, is slightly shifted upwards. As a function of temperature, for fixed nucleon density, the imaginary part of the selfenergy increases further due to Bose enhancement. At the same time the mass shift from the real part becomes very large. As a consequence of these medium effects, the dilepton rate in the low-mass region below 650 MeV increases strongly, while the peak at 770 MeV disappears. In the second part of this thesis a chirally symmetric hadronic model for vector and axial-vector correlators in vacuum and at finite temperature is presented. The dominant contributions to these correlators come from intermediate pions, rho and a1 mesons which are calculated in one-loop approximation. The resulting spectral functions in vacuum are in good agreement with the data measured by the ALEPH collaboration. The consistency of the model with global chiral symmetry can be seen from the validity of the Goldstone theorem and the vanishing longitudinal part of the axial-vector correlator in the chiral limit (PCAC). At finite temperature the width of the rho meson and of the vector correlator increases. Although the formula for the rho-meson mass on tree level seems to indicate a dropping rho mass similar to the "Brown-Rho scaling" hypothesis, it can be shown that the rho mass, i.e. the position of the maximum of the vector correlator, remains unchanged to leading order in the temperature. The same is true for the a1 meson and the axial-vector correlator. In the vector as well as in the axial-vector correlator hints for the "Eletsky-Ioffe mixing" are found. | English |