Reinterpretation of Thermal Dilepton Emission Rate by Spectral Functions

We reinterpret the dilepton emission rate from a hadronic gas expected to be produced in heavy ion collisions in terms of the spectral functions available from the $e^+e^-$ annihilation and the $\tau$ lepton decays experiments. We take into account all possible hadronic state especially the multi-pion contributions to the dilepton emission and the parity mixing phenomenon due to the soft final-state corrections. A new compilation of the experimental data for the spectral functions is presented.