Anomalous spin polarization from turbulent color fields

TL;DR

This paper investigates how turbulent color fields in quark-gluon plasmas influence quark spin polarization, offering insights into local parity violation and explaining observed vector meson spin alignment in nuclear collisions.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum kinetic theory framework to connect gluon-induced color field fluctuations with quark spin polarization, highlighting a novel mechanism for local parity violation.

Findings

Color field correlators generate axial charge currents.

The model explains vector meson spin alignment.

Provides a new perspective on spin transport in quark-gluon plasmas.

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.