Related papers: Viewpoint: Vector meson spin alignment by the stro…
We present highlights of recent results from the STAR Collaboration at RHIC, focusing on the properties of the early medium created in heavy ion collisions. We emphasize the strangeness production including the observation of a hypernucleus…
Spin fluctuations and density fluctuations are studied for a two-component gas of strongly interacting fermions along the BEC-BCS crossover. This is done by in-situ imaging of dispersive speckle patterns. Compressibility and magnetic…
We report the measurements of spin alignment ($\rho_{00}$) for $K^{*0}$, $\overline{K^{*0}}$, $K^{*+}$, and $K^{*-}$ vector mesons in RHIC isobar collisions (Zr+Zr and Ru+Ru) at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm {NN}}}$ = 200 GeV. We observe the first…
We revisit the effective theory for fluctuating spin stripes coupled to a Fermi surface, and consider the parameter regime where a spin nematic phase intervenes between the spin density wave state and the symmetric state. It is shown that…
Two magnetic aspects of quark matter, ferromagnetism and spin density wave, are discussed in the temperature-density plane. Some implications of ferromagnetism are suggested on relativistic heavy-ion collisions and compact stars.
The change in the energy of the moving heavy (charm and bottom) quarks due to field fluctuations present in the hot QCD medium has been studied. A finite quark chemical potential has been considered while modeling the hot QCD medium…
QCD sum rules predict that the change of the strange quark condensate $<\bar s s>$ in hadron matter at finite baryon density causes a shift of the peak position of the di-electron spectra from $\phi$ meson decays. Due to the expansion of…
The hot and dense matter formed in relativistic heavy-ion collisions at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is termed quark-gluon plasma (QGP). The evolution of the medium is characterized by non-trivial…
3-flavor quark matter (strange quark matter; SQM) can be stable or metastable for a wide range of strong interaction parameters. If so, SQM can play an important role in cosmology, neutron stars, cosmic ray physics, and relativistic…
In a series of three lectures, I review the theory and phenomenology of heavy quark masses and mixing angles and the status of their determination. In addition, I give an introduction to heavy quark symmetry, with the main emphasis on the…
Densities in compact stars may be such that quarks are no longer confined in hadrons, but instead behave as weakly interacting particles. In this regime perturbative calculations are possible. Yet, due to high pressures and an attractive…
The chiral magnetic effect (CME) is a novel transport phenomenon, arising from the interplay between quantum anomalies and strong magnetic fields in chiral systems. In high-energy nuclear collisions, the CME may survive the expansion of the…
Based on a generalized side-jump formalism for massless chiral fermions, which naturally takes into account the spin-orbit coupling in the scattering of two chiral fermions and the chiral vortical effect in a rotating chiral fermion matter,…
The findings on the spin polarization of $\Lambda$, $\Xi$, and $\Omega$ hyperons and spin alignment of $K^{*0}$, $\phi$, and $D^{*+}$ mesons in relativistic heavy-ion collision experiments at the RHIC and LHC facilities propose the…
We present a system size and energy dependence of $\phi$ meson production in Cu+Cu and Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$=62.4 GeV and 200 GeV measured by the STAR experiment at RHIC. We find that the number of participant scaled $\phi$…
We review the results in our recent works on the generation of strong magnetic fields in compact stars driven by the parity violating electroweak interactions between background fermions. The cases of a neutron star, a hybrid star, and a…
We analyze the correlation function of a meson with one heavy and one light quark in inverse powers of the heavy quark mass $m_Q$ using a succession of Foldy-Wouthuysen-type transformations prior to radiative corrections. We evaluate the…
We recently presented a method of analyzing invariant-mass spectra of kaon pairs resulting from decay of $\phi$ mesons produced in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. It can be used to extract the shifts in the mass and the width ($\Delta M$…
The STAR detector will bring unique capabilities to the study of $\vec{p}+\vec{p}$ collisions up to total center of mass energies of 500 GeV at RHIC. The large acceptance of the time projection chamber and the electromagnetic calorimeter…
The theory of heavy meson masses, in which the symmetries of heavy and light quarks are exploited, can be used to describe the low energy interaction among heavy mesons to a better extent. The spin-flavor symmetry leads to many interesting…