# Open Strange Mesons in (magnetized) nuclear matter

## TL;DR

This paper studies how the masses and decay widths of open strange mesons, such as $K^*$ and $K_1$, change in magnetized, asymmetric nuclear matter using QCD sum rules and a chiral model, revealing medium and magnetic field effects.

## Contribution

It provides a novel analysis of open strange meson properties in magnetized nuclear matter using QCD sum rules combined with a chiral model, including decay width calculations.

## Key findings

- Masses of $K^*$ and $K_1$ decrease in medium
- Magnetic fields affect $K^*$ mass and decay width
- Decay widths are modified by medium and magnetic effects

## Abstract

We investigate the mass modifications of open strange mesons (vector $K^*$ and axial vector $K_1$) in (magnetized) isospin asymmetric nuclear matter using quantum chromodynamics sum rule (QCDSR) approach. The in-medium decay widths of $K^*$ $\rightarrow$ $K\pi$ and $K_1$ $\rightarrow$ $K^*\pi$ are studied from the mass modifications of $K_1$, $K^*$ and $K$ mesons, using a light quark-antiquark pair creation model, namely the ${}^3 P_0$ model. The in-medium decay width for $K_1$ $\rightarrow$ $K^*\pi$ is compared with the decay widths calculated using a phenomenological Lagrangian. The effects of magnetic fields are also studied on the mass and the partial decay width of the vector $K^*$ meson decaying to $K\pi$. Within the QCD sum rule approach, the medium effects on the masses of the open strange mesons are calculated from the light quark condensates and the gluon condensates in the hadronic medium. The quark condensates are calculated from the medium modifications of the scalar fields ($\sigma$, $\zeta$, and $\delta$) in the mean field approximation within a chiral $SU(3)$ model, while the scalar gluon condensate is obtained from the medium modification of a scalar dilaton field ($\chi$), which is introduced within the model to imitate the scale invariance breaking of QCD.