A research team led by Prof. Wang Qun from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has made significant progress in the theoretical study of vector meson spin physics, specifically regarding the intriguing behavior of ϕ mesons generated during collisions between gold nuclei.
Their results, published in Physical Review Letters, titled ”Spin Alignment of Vector Mesons in Heavy-Ion Collisions,” represent a significant milestone that challenges conventional theoretical models.
Vector fields are an effective representation of strong interactions between exotic quarks. In the hadronization phase of relativistic heavy-ion collisions, where chiral symmetry is spontaneously broken, the strongly interacting matter can be described by quarks and by the SU(3) pseudo-Goldstone boson field surrounding the quarks.
The vector field is determined by the gradient degree of the Goldstone boson field, where the vector field coupled to strange quarks and antistrange quarks is called the ϕ-vector field.
In 2019, the research group led by Wang suggested that the influence of the ambient vector field felt by the strange quarks and anti-strange quarks and leads to a significant deviation of the spin alignment of the ϕ meson by 1/3.
2023-09-22 10:48:02
Original from phys.org