Electric charge separation in strong transient magnetic fields

Authors:
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
We discuss various mechanisms for the creation of an asymmetric charge fluctuation with respect to the reaction plane among hadrons emitted in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. We show that such mechanisms exist in both the hadronic gas and the partonic phases of quantum chromodynamics. The mechanisms considered here all require the presence of a strong magnetic field (the ``chiral magnetic effect''), but they do not involve parity or charge-parity violations. We analyze how a transient local electric current fluctuation generated by the chiral magnetic effect can dynamically evolve into an asymmetric charge distribution among final-state hadrons in momentum space. We estimate the magnitude of the event-by-event fluctuations of the final-state charge asymmetry owing to partonic and hadronic mechanisms.

This publication has 47 references indexed in Scilit: