Investigation of experimental observables in search of the chiral magnetic effect in heavy-ion collisions in the STAR experiment

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 quark-gluon plasma fireball and be detected in experiments.Over the past two decades,experimental searches for the CME have attracted extensive interest at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider(RHIC)and the Large Hadron Collider(LHC).The main goal of this study is to investigate three pertinent experimental approaches:the$\gamma$correlator,the R correlator,and the signed balance functions.We exploit simple Monte Carlo simulations and a realistic event generator(EBE-AVFD)to verify the equivalence of the core components among these methods and to ascertain their sensitivities to the CME signal and the background contributions for the isobar collisions at the RHIC.

The effect of hadronic scatterings on the measurement of vector meson spin alignments in heavy-ion collisions

Spin alignments of vector mesons and hyperons in relativistic heavy-ion collisions have been proposed as signals of global polarization.The STAR experiment first observed the ∧ polarization.Recently,the ALICE collaboration measured the transverse momentum {PT) and the collision centrality dependence of K*,and Φ spin alignments during Pb-Pb collisions at 1/2sNN=2.76 TeV.A large signal is observed in the low pT region of mid-central collisions for K*,while the signal is much smaller for Φ,and these have not been understood yet.Since vector mesons have different lifetimes and their decay products have different scattering cross sections,they suffer from different hadronic effects.In this paper,we study the effect of hadronic interactions on the spin alignment of K*,Φ,and p mesons in relativistic heavy-ion collisions with a multi-phase transport model.We find that hadronic scatterings lead to a deviation of the observed spin alignment matrix element p00 away from the true value for p and K*mesons(with a bigger effect on p) while the effect is negligible for the Φ meson.The effect depends on the kinematic acceptance:the observed p00 value is lower than the true value when the pseudorapidity(η) coverage is small,while there is little effect when the η coverage is large.Hence,this study provides valuable information to understand the vector meson spin alignment signals observed during the experiments.