The spin alignment of vector mesons with light front quarks

Abstract

The global spin alignment of the vector meson has been observed in relativistic heavy ion collisions, but is still on hot debates in the theoretical community. Here we propose to apply the light front framework to explain this phenomenon since the light front form explicitly describes the hadron spin including both the quark spin and the orbital angular momentum. After applying the light front spinor, we find that the spin alignment in the polarization of vector mesons with $\rho_{00}>1/3$ can be naturally manifested and in particular, the obtained spin alignment for $\phi$ meson is in good agreement with the experimental data. This implies that to explain the spin alignment it is important to properly include the contribution from the gluon interactions that are presented in terms of the orbital angular momentum of the hadron bound state.