Speaker
Enrico Speranza
(CERN)
Description
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the study of spin-polarization phenomena in heavy-ion collisions. Most current approaches assume that polarization is a final-state effect that is induced by specific fluid properties such as vorticity. In this talk, I will discuss an alternative mechanism: a spin density is present in the initial state of the collisions, as it is carried by the nucleons within the colliding nuclei. This initial spin density induces a net polarization of the QCD fireball, whose event-by-event fluctuations can be probed through the spin correlation of final-state hyperons. The discovery of this phenomenon would have profound implications on our understanding of spin in relativistic hydrodynamics.
