Findings may point to a previously unknown influence of the strong force—and a way to measure its local fluctuations. Given the choice of three different “spin” orientations, certain particles emerging from collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), an atom smasher at the U.S. Depa
New data show that local fluctuations in the nuclear strong force may influence the spin orientation of particles called phi mesons . Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory
“It could be that the strong force fluctuations are the missing factor. Previously we hadn’t realized the strong force can influence particle spin in this way,” said Aihong Tang, a STAR physicist at Brookhaven who was involved in the analysis. Tracking pairs of positively and negatively charged kaons —the decay products of phi mesons —revealed that these mesons appear to have a preference for one among three possible spin states. A new theoretical model suggests that local fluctuations in the strong nuclear force may explain this preference.
“If the probability of each of these three states equals one-third, then that means there’s no preference for the particle to be in any one of these three spin alignment states,” explained STAR physicist Xu Sun, a former postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who recently joined the Institute of Modern Physics, China, as a staff scientist.particles—no preference. But for the phi mesons, there was a strong signal that one state was preferred over the other two.
“Our results stood up to this scrutiny, and still the numbers do not add up,” Tang said. Describing the global spin alignment of the phi meson using only the conventional mechanisms would result in a value lower than what the scientists measured at STAR.
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