Ρ-meson Production and Decay in Proton-nucleus Collisions *

We analyze the production of ρ-mesons in p + A reactions including both the production by proton-nucleon as well as pion-nucleon collisions within a coupled channel transport approach. The final state interactions of the ρ-meson with nucleons are evaluated from a resonance model which allows to extract elastic and inelastic cross sections. We include the latter final state interactions, the ρ-meson decay into two pions as well as the final pion-nucleon interactions within the transport approach. We find the invariant mass distribution of pion pairs to be sensitive to the ρ-meson properties in the nuclear medium. However, due to the strong final state interactions of pions only light targets like 12 C might be suited to extract a ρ-signal from the uncorrelated two pion background which carries information about the in-medium properties of the ρ-meson.