Description
Title: The Emergence and Disappearance of Λ Spin Correlations: From QCD Vacuum to Hadronization
Speaker: Feng Liu
Abstract: Recent STAR measurements of Λ hyperon spin correlations suggest the production of spin-entangled quark-antiquark pairs from the QCD vacuum. This vacuum-origin interpretation, however, appears to be challenged by the latest preliminary CMS results. Moreover, the observed correlations are significant only at short range and vanish at large pair separation, leaving their emergence and disappearance an open question. In this talk, after a brief review of the STAR measurement, I will introduce a phenomenological framework that unifies these observations within a coherent physical picture, offering new insights into the connections among the QCD vacuum, quantum decoherence, and the nonperturbative dynamics of hadronization.
About the speaker: Feng Liu is currently a 1st-year Ph.D. student at Stony Brook University under the supervision of Zhoudunming (Kong) Tu. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2025. He was recently awarded the JSPC Early Career Scientist Award at the SQM 2026 conference.
