Hadronic scattering of charmed mesons

The scattering cross sections of charm mesons with hadrons such as the pion, rho meson, and nucleon are studied in an effective Lagrangian. In heavy ion collisions, rescattering of produced charm mesons by hadrons affects the invariant mass spectra of both charm meson pairs and dileptons resulting from their decays. These effects are estimated for heavy ion collisions at SPS energies and are found to be significant.