  We study fermionic excitations in a hot and dense strongly interacting medium
consisting of quarks and (pseudo-)scalar mesons. In particular, we use the
two-flavor quark-meson model in combination with the Functional Renormalization
Group approach, which allows to take into account the effects from thermal and
quantum fluctuations. The resulting fermionic excitation spectrum is
investigated by calculating the quark spectral function at finite temperature,
quark chemical potential, and spatial momentum. This involves an analytic
continuation from imaginary to real energies by extending the previously
introduced analytically-continued FRG (aFRG) method to the present case. We
identify three different collective excitations in the medium: the ordinary
thermal quark, the plasmino mode, and an ultra-soft "phonino" mode. The
dispersion relations of these modes are extracted from the quark spectral
function. When compared to corresponding results from an FRG-improved one-loop
calculation remarkable agreement is found.
