Journal Article

Pattern of global spin alignment of Φ and K0 mesons in heavy-ion collisions

Ray, R. L., Huang, T., Zurek, M., Cai, X. Z., Ullrich, T., Shi, Y., Sumbera, M., Xiao, Z. G., Fawzi, F. M., Liu, Z., Kiselev, A., Westfall, G. D., Dhamija, A., Hu, C., Pan, J., Kechechyan, A., Chattopadhyay, S., Knospe, A. G., Zhang, Z. J., Leung, Y. H., Nayak, K., Pandey, A. K., Wang, Z., Pruthi, N. K., Putschke, J., Xu, N., Ghimire, N., Harabasz, S., Chang, Z., Nie, M., Wieman, H., Yang, Y., Nishitani, R., Aggarwal, I., Feng, C. J., Pawlik, B., Wang, Y., Nam, J. D., Chen, D., Kravtsov, P., Zhang, S., Drachenberg, J. L., Derevschikov, A. A., Minaev, N. G., Stanislaus, T. S., Stringfellow, B., Galatyuk, T., Schmitz, N., Luo, X. F., Perkins, C., Porter, J., Stefaniak, M., Bairathi, V., Kang, K., Li, C., Todoroki, T., Ko, H. S., Chatterjee, A., Liang, Y., Sichtermann, E. P., Okubo, K., Anderson, D. M., Jia, J., Zhu, X., Crawford, H. J., Huang, S. L., Adams, J. R., Shen, D. Y., Kosarzewski, L. K., Chakaberia, I., Ljubicic, T., Pluta, J., Agakishiev, G., Jacobs, W. W., Holub, L., Wissink, S. W., Kelsey, M., Voloshin, S. A., Adam, J., Mazer, J. A., Tu, Z., Cebra, D., Averichev, G. S., Hu, Q., Barish, K., Seto, R., He, Y., Svirida, D. N., Suaide, A. P., Fazio, S., Nii

2023

Overview

Despite decades of progress since Yukawa first developed a description of the force between nucleons in terms of meson exchange, a full understanding of the strong interaction remains a major challenge in modern science. One remaining difficulty arises from the non-perturbative nature of the strong force, which leads to the phenomenon of quark confinement at distances on the order of the size of the proton. Here we show that in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, where quarks and gluons are set free over an extended volume, two species of produced vector (spin-1) mesons, namely φ and K*0 , emerge with a surprising pattern of global spin alignment. In particular, the global spin alignment for φ is unexpectedly large, while that for K*0 is consistent with zero. The observed spin-alignment pattern and magnitude for the φ cannot be explained by conventional mechanisms, while a model with a connection to strong force fields, i.e. an effective proxy description within the Standard Model and Quantum Chromodynamics, accommodates the current data. This connection, if fully established, will open a potential new avenue for studying the behaviour of strong force fields.

• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
• Subject: Experimental nuclear physics / Experimental particle physics / NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS