Spin Alignment of Vector Mesons in Polarized and Unpolarized High Energy Reactions
Abstract
Recent e+e- annihilation experiments show a striking spin alignment of vector mesons produced in the fragmentation of a polarized quark.We show that these data imply a simple relation between the polarization of the anti-quark, which is produced in the fragmentation process to combine with the fragmenting quark to form the meson, and that of the fragmenting quark. After having obtained a good fit to the e+e- data, we extend the calculations to lepton-nucleon and nucleon-nucleon collisions with polarized beams. We also discuss the relation between the spin alignment of vector meson in unpolarized hadron-hadron collisions and the single-spin left-right asymmetry. We make predictions for the polarization of the vector mesons in these reactions which can be checked by future experiments.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.hep-ph/0312003,
title = {Spin Alignment of Vector Mesons in Polarized and Unpolarized High Energy Reactions},
author = {Zuo-tang Liang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/0312003},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
Prepared for the proceedings of the X-th International Workshop on High Energy Spin Physics, JINR Dubna, Sept. 16 - 20, 2003