$K_1/K^{\ast }$ enhancement as a signature of chiral symmetry restoration in heavy ion collisions

Abstract

Based on the fact that the mass difference between the chiral partners is an order parameter of chiral phase transition and that the chiral order parameter reduces substantially at the chemical freeze-out point in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions, we argue that the production ratio of $K_1$ over $K^{\ast }$ in such collisions should be substantially larger than that predicted in the statistical hadronization model. We further show that while the enhancement effect might be contaminated by the relatively larger decrease of $K_1$ meson than $K^{\ast }$ meson during the hadronic phase, the signal will be visible through a systematic study on centrality as the kinetic freeze-out temperature is higher and the hadronic life time shorter in peripheral collisions than in central collisions.

10 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Glauber Modeling in High Energy Nuclear Collisions
• Particle spectra and HBT radii for simulated central nuclear collisions of C+C, Al+Al, Cu+Cu, Au+Au, and Pb+Pb from Sqrt(s)=62.4-2760 GeV
• Dilepton production in a schematic causal viscous hydrodynamics
• Sensitivity improvement in hidden photon detection using resonant cavities

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Measuring spin correlation between quarks during QCD confinement
• Is $K_1/K^{\ast }$ enhancement in heavy ion collisions a signature of chiral symmetry restoration?
• ${\mathrm{K}}_1(1270)$ production in pp collisions with ALICE