Spin alignment from turbulent color fields

TL;DR

This paper explores how gluons and color fields influence quark spin polarization in quark-gluon plasmas, potentially explaining experimental observations of spin alignment and linking to local parity violation.

Contribution

It extends quantum kinetic theory to include non-Abelian fields, revealing gluon-induced spin polarization mechanisms in relativistic plasmas.

Findings

Spin polarization can be induced by parity-odd color field correlators.

Gluon effects may dominate over collisions at weak coupling.

Provides a possible explanation for vector meson spin alignment in nuclear collisions.

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 extend the newly developed quantum kinetic theory for relativistic fermions to the case coupled with non-Abelian chromo-electromagnetic fields and employ this formalism to investigate the spin polarization of quarks under dynamically generated color fields in near-equilibrium quark gluon plasmas. It is found that the spin polarization could be induced by parity-odd correlators of color fields, which may dominate over collisional effects at weak coupling. Our result provides with a possible explanation for the spin alignment of vector mesons measured in high-energy nuclear collisions and alludes to the connection with local parity violation.