Chiral magnetic effect

Chiral magnetic effect (CME) is the generation of electric current along an external magnetic field induced by chirality imbalance. The CME is a macroscopic quantum phenomenon present in systems with charged chiral fermions, such as the quark-gluon plasma, or Dirac and Weyl semimetals; for review, see.[1] The CME is a consequence of chiral anomaly in quantum field theory; unlike conventional superconductivity or superfluidity, it does not require a spontaneous symmetry breaking. The chiral magnetic current is non-dissipative, because it is topologically protected: the imbalance between the densities of left- and right-handed chiral fermions is linked to the topology of fields in gauge theory by the Atiyah-Singer index theorem.

The experimental observation of CME in a Dirac semimetal ZrTe5 was reported in 2014 by a group from Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University.[2][3] The STAR detector at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, Brookhaven National Laboratory [4] and ALICE: A Large Ion Collider Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN[5] presented an experimental evidence for the existence of CME in the quark-gluon plasma [6]

References

  1. ↑ D. Kharzeev, "The Chiral Magnetic Effect and anomaly-induced transport", Progress in Particle and Nuclear Physics, v. 75, p. 133-151 (2014).
  2. ↑ Q. Li, D. E. Kharzeev, C. Zhang, Y. Huang, I. Pletikosić, A. V. Fedorov, R. D. Zhong, J. A. Schneeloch, G. D. Gu & T. Valla, "Chiral magnetic effect in ZrTe5", Nature Physics (2016) DOI: 10.1038/nphys3648; arXiv:1412.6543
  3. ↑ "Chiral magnetic effect generates quantum current", Phys.org (February 2016)
  4. ↑ L. Adamczyk et al. (STAR Collaboration) "Observation of charge asymmetry dependence of pion elliptic flow and the possible chiral magnetic wave in heavy-ion collisions", Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 252302 (2015)
  5. ↑ R. Belmont et al. (ALICE Collaboration) "Charge-dependent anisotropic flow studies and the search for the Chiral Magnetic Wave in ALICE", Nucl. Phys. A 931, 981 (2014)
  6. ↑ "Scientists see ripples of a particle-separating wave in primordial plasma", Phys.org (June 2015)
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