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 the global polarization. The STAR experiment first observed $\rm \Lambda$ Recently, ALICE collaboration measured transverse momentum ($p_T$) collision centrality dependence $K^*$ $\phi$ spin Pb-Pb at \sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV. A large signal is low $p_T$ region mid-central for while much smaller $\phi$, these not understood yet. Since different lifetimes their decay products scattering cross sections, they suffer from hadronic effects. In this paper, we study effect interactions on alignment $K^*$, $\rho$ with a multi-phase transport model. We find that scatterings lead to deviation matrix element $\rho_{00}$ away true value (with bigger $\rho$) negligible meson. depends kinematic acceptance: lower than when pseudorapidity ($\eta$) coverage small there little $\eta$ big. Our thus provides valuable information understand meson experiments.