Spectral properties and spin alignment of $\phi$ meson in QCD Matter

As the spin alignment of a vector meson is predicted to be correlated with its spectral properties, we study the spectral properties of the $\phi$ meson using two microscopic Lagrangians based either on chiral effective field theory or the quark-meson model. We calculate the self-energies and spectral functions of the $\phi$ meson for these two Lagrangians at the one-loop level within the Matsubara formalism of finite-temperature quantum field theory, employing various parameters to represent different physical scenarios. Using these spectral functions, transport coefficients related to the spin alignment and tensor polarization are obtained, connecting the spin alignment of the $\phi$ meson to hydrodynamic gradients. Using the standard freeze-out picture within the relativistic hydrodynamic model, we explore how the possible pattern of the spin alignment can be generated using these microscopically calculated spectral functions. We discover that, with certain assumptions, these simple microscopic model-based calculations can produce sizable spin alignments with a sign-flipping behavior in their $p_T$ and centrality dependence, similar to those observed in experiments.