Anomalous spin polarization from turbulent color fields

Abstract

We study the important, yet widely overlooked, role of gluons for spin transport with a connection to local parity violation in quark gluon plasmas. We employ the formalism of quantum kinetic theory to quarks in weakly coupled quantum chromodynamics to derive the source terms for quark spin polarization. These source terms involve parity-odd correlators of dynamically generated color fields in near-equilibrium quark gluon plasmas and give rise to locally fluctuating axial charge currents. Our results provide a possible explanation for the spin alignment of vector mesons measured in high-energy nuclear collisions.

7 pages, 1 figure, corrected version post Erratum

References in corpus (18)

• The Chiral Magnetic Effect
• Berry Curvature, Triangle Anomalies, and the Chiral Magnetic Effect in Fermi Liquids
• Lorentz Invariance in Chiral Kinetic Theory
• Shear-induced spin polarization in heavy-ion collisions
• Fate of spin polarization in a relativistic fluid: An entropy-current analysis
• Local polarization and isothermal local equilibrium in relativistic heavy ion collisions
• Spin-thermal shear coupling in a relativistic fluid
• The Sphaleron Rate in SU(N) Gauge Theory
• Collisions in Chiral Kinetic Theory
• Anomalous Viscosity of an Expanding Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Relativistic spin hydrodynamics with torsion and linear response theory for spin relaxation
• Spin polarization induced by the hydrodynamic gradients
• Reexamination of local spin polarization beyond global equilibrium in relativistic heavy ion collisions
• Mass Correction to Chiral Kinetic Equations
• Anomalous Transport Processes in Anisotropically Expanding Quark-Gluon Plasmas
• Improved quark coalescence model for spin alignment and polarization of hadrons
• Covariant Chiral Kinetic Equation in Non-Abelian Gauge field from "covariant gradient expansion"
• Helicity polarization in relativistic heavy ion collisions