Extracting the magnitude of magnetic field at freeze-out in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract A strong magnetic field influences significantly the masses of the charged light mesons. For example, the mass of charged pion increases with the magnetic field increasing. We propose this mechanism as a possible way to extract the magnitude of magnetic field at freeze-out in heavy ion collisions and thus help constrain its lifetime which is currently a major open question to resolve. Specifically we show that the ratio between the yield of charged pions and that of charged rhos is very sensitive to the magnetic field value at freeze-out. By using a viscous-hydrodynamic framework (iEBE-VISHNU) to simulate heavy ion collisions and implementing magnetic-field-dependent meson masses, we compute their yields and predict the dependence of such ratio on the magnetic field. We suggest to use this ratio of charged rho yield over charged pion yield as an experimental observable to extract the possible magnetic field at freeze-out in heavy ion collisions.