Rescattering effect on the measurement of K* spin alignment in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

Spin alignment of vector mesons in noncentral relativistic heavy ion collisions provides a novel probe of the global quark polarization and hadronization mechanism. In this paper, we discuss the spin alignment of a short-lived vector meson, namely K*, arising from the hadronic rescattering process using the UrQMD model. This spin alignment is not related to global quark polarization but cannot be distinguished from those arising from global quark polarization in experiments. The spin alignment parameter ${\rho }_{00}$ is found to deviate from 1/3 by up to -0.008 (0.03) with respect to the reaction (production) plane. These deviations are much larger than the expected signal from all the theoretical models implementing the conventional global quark polarization mechanism as well as the current experimental precision, and should be considered seriously when comparing measurements with theoretical calculations.

arXiv comment13 pages, 9 figures, accepted version

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Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Spin alignment of vector mesons by second-order hydrodynamic gradients
• Spin polarization and correlation of quarks from glasma
• Transverse and longitudinal spin alignment from color fields in heavy ion collisions
• Quarkonium Polarization in Medium from Open Quantum Systems and Chromomagnetic Correlators
• Effect of hadronic interaction on the flow of $K^{\ast 0}$