Anisotropic hadronic rescattering and its impact on $K^{*0}$ yield, and polarization observable

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the anisotropic suppression of reconstructed $K^{*0}$ resonances arising from hadronic rescattering using the A Multi-Phase Transport (AMPT) model for Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200$ GeV. We demonstrate that the rescattering probability of the decay daughters depends strongly on the decay angle $\theta^{*}$ due to Lorentz boost effects, which lead to smaller laboratory-frame momenta for daughters emitted opposite to the parent particle motion. This anisotropic suppression influences several experimentally measured observables. We show that the reconstructed $K^{*0}$ yield exhibits a strong $\theta^{*}$ dependence. Furthermore, the anisotropic loss of resonances modifies the angular distributions used to extract the spin alignment parameter $\rho_{00}$ in the production-plane and helicity frames. Even in the absence of intrinsic polarization in the model, the reconstructed $K^{*0}$ sample shows deviations of $\rho_{00}$ from the unpolarized value of $1/3$, with opposite trends in the two reference frames. These results demonstrate that hadronic rescattering can generate apparent polarization signals and must be carefully considered in experimental measurements of vector-meson spin alignment using production plane and helicity frame.