Transverse and longitudinal spin alignment from color fields in heavy ion collisions

Abstract: We analyze the spin alignment of vector mesons stemming from spin correlation of the quark and antiquark induced by background color fields in relativistic heavy ion collisions. The quark-coalescence equation relating the collision kernel of the vector-meson kinetic equation to spin alignment is expanded to the relativistic case. Focusing on the color-octet contribution, the spin alignment for $\phi$ mesons from glasma fields with momentum dependence is investigated, where the scenarios for different spin quantization axes are considered. Moreover, we qualitatively analyze the spin alignment from isotropic color fields in the quark gluon plasma phase for comparison. In particular, we propose that the experimental measurement of spin alignment along the beam direction, dubbed as the longitudinal spin alignment, could be useful to identify the dominance of longitudinal spin correlation potentially led by the glasma effect in high-energy nuclear collisions.