  Based on general arguments the in-medium quark propagator in a quark-gluon
plasma leads to a quark dispersion relation consisting of two branches, of
which one exhibits a minimum at some finite momentum. This results in a
vanishing group velocity for collective quark modes. Important quantities such
as the production rate of low mass lepton pairs and mesonic correlators depend
inversely on this group velocity. Therefore these quantities, which follow from
self energy diagrams containing a quark loop, are strongly affected by Van Hove
singularities (peaks and gaps). If these sharp structures could be observed in
relativistic heavy-ion collisions it would reveal the physical picture of the
QGP as a gas of quasiparticles.
