Shear induced polarization: Collisional contributions

Abstract

It has been realized that thermal shear plays a similar role as thermal vorticity in polarizing spin of particles in heavy ion collisions. We point out that shear has a fundamental difference that it leads to particle redistribution in the medium. The redistribution gives rise to an additional contribution to spin polarization through the self-energy, which is parametrically the same order as the one considered so far in the literature. The self-energy contribution is in general gauge dependent. We introduce double gauge links stretching along the Schwinger-Keldysh contour to restore gauge invariance. We also generalize the straight path to adapt to the Schwinger-Keldysh contour. We find another contribution associated with the gauge link, which is also parametrically the same order. We illustrate the two contributions with a massive probe fermion in massless QED plasma with shear. A modest suppression of spin polarization is found from the combined contributions when the probe fermion has momentum much greater than the temperature.