Polarized φ meson rates with viscous corrections at energies available at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

We discuss the emission of φ mesons with longitudinal and transverse polarization in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions. In the hadronic phase and in leading order in the kaon diluteness, φ emission is isotropic and driven by the flavor singlet and octet vector spectral functions. At next-to-leading order, the emissivities receive a nonisotropic correction from the flavor octet spectral function, and the nonequilibrium contributions originating from the shear and bulk viscosities. Implications for the φ meson alignment in heavy-ion collisions are discussed.