Weak magnetic effect in quark-gluon plasma and local spin polarization

Abstract

We propose the weak magnetic effect, which emerges in quark-gluon plasma close to local thermal equilibrium as the dissipative correction to the quark phase space distribution function, as a novel contribution to the observed Lambda hyperon local spin polarization. With a finite field strength, which is consistent with previous estimate of the magnetic field in heavy-ion collisions, one is able to explain the experimentally observed Lambda local spin polarization through all centrality classes. Moreover, the weak magnetic effect plays an unambiguous role in the ordering between the second-order and the third-order modulations of the Lambda local spin polarization in experiments.