Off-diagonal helicity density matrix elements for heavy vector mesons inclusively produced in N-N, gamma-N, l-N interactions

Abstract

Final state interactions in quark fragmentation may give origin to non zero values of the off-diagonal element rho_(1,-1) of the helicity density matrix of vector mesons V produced in current jets, with a large energy fraction x_E; the value of rho_(1,-1)(V) is related to the hard constituent dynamics and tests unusual properties of it. Some recent data on phi, K^* and D^* produced in e^+ e^- annihilations at LEP show such effects. Predictions are given here for rho_(1,-1) of heavy mesons produced in nucleon-nucleon, gamma-nucleon and lepton-nucleon interactions.

LaTeX, 10 pages, 1 postscript figure, uses epsfig.sty. Revised version, to be published on Phys. Lett. B. Some statements added to clarify text

References in corpus (1)

• Spin alignment of leading K*(892)^0 mesons in hadronic Z^0 decays

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