The chiral magnetic effect is a novel quantum phenomenon proposed for high-energy nuclear collisions but which has yet to be observed. We quantify the axial charge relaxation time, due to sphalerons, which enters in simulations of this effect. An extrapolation of weak coupling calculations of the sphaleron rate yields rather different relaxation times than strong coupling AdS/CFT calculations. The AdS/CFT relaxation time is the larger one of the two by an order of magnitude, but the weak coupling relaxation time may not be reliable because it is only marginally bigger than the microscopic thermalization time. The role of quark masses has yet to be accurately assessed.
The recently discovered inverse magnetic catalysis around the critical temperature indicates that some important information is missing in our current understanding of conventional chiral dynamics of QCD, which is enhanced by the magnetic field. In this work, we provide a mechanism to explain that the inverse magnetic catalysis around the critical temperature is induced by sphalerons. At high temperatures, sphaleron transitions between distinct classical vacua cause an asymmetry between the number of right- and left-handed quarks due to the axial anomaly of QCD. In the presence of a strong mag…
We develop an analytical technique to evaluate the magnetic helicity in the debris from sphaleron decay. We show that baryon number production leads to left-handed magnetic fields, and that the magnetic helicity is conserved at late times. Our analysis explicitly demonstrates the connection between sphaleron-mediated cosmic baryogenesis and cosmic magnetogenesis.
We elucidate a magnetic mass effect on a sphaleron energy that is crucial for baryon number preservation needed for successful electroweak baryogenesis. It is found that the sphaleron energy increases in response to the magnetic mass. As an application, we study the sphaleron energy and electroweak phase transition with the magnetic mass in a two-Higgs-doublet model. Although the magnetic mass can screen the gauge boson loops, it relaxes a baryon number preservation criterion more effectively, broadening the baryogenesis-possible region. Our findings would be universal in any new physics model…
The time-evolution of the magnetic field in hot homogeneous nuclear matter has two qualitatively different stages separated by the sphaleron transition time $τ_c$. At early times the axial chemical potential and the corresponding chiral conductivity $σ_χ$ are slow functions of time. The soft chiral modes $k<σ_χ$ of the magnetic field grow exponentially with time, which is known as the chiral instability. At later times $σ_χ$ fluctuates due to the sphaleron transitions and can be regarded as a random process. It is argued that the average magnetic field is exponentially damped at later times. T…
In an external magnetic field, the energy of the electroweak sphaleron---representing the energy barrier to baryon and lepton number violation---decreases but remains nonzero until the upper Ambjorn-Olesen critical field strength set by the Higgs mass and the electric charge, where it vanishes. We demonstrate this by numerically computing the sphaleron configuration in the presence of an external magnetic field, over the full range of field strengths until the energy barrier vanishes. We discuss the implications for baryogenesis in the early universe, and the possibility of observing of baryon…
We start by considering the production rates of sphalerons with different size $ρ$ in the symmetric phase, $T>T_{EW}$. At small $ρ$, the distribution is cut off by the growing mass $M\sim 1/ρ$, and at large $ρ$ by the magnetic screening mass. In the broken phase, $T<T_{EW}$ the scale is set by the Higgs VEV $v(T)$. We introduce the concept of "Sphaleron freezeout" whereby the sphaleron production rate matches the Hubble Universe expansion rate. At freezeout the sphalerons are out of equilibrium. Sphaleron explosions generate sound and even gravity waves, when nonzero Weinberg angle make them n…
We perform first classical-statistical real time lattice simulations of topological transitions in the non-equilibrium Glasma of weakly coupled but highly occupied gauge fields created immediately after the collision of ultra-relativistic nuclei. Simplifying our description by employing SU(2) gauge fields, and neglecting their longitudinal expansion, we find that the rate of topological transitions is initially strongly enhanced relative to the thermal sphaleron transition rate and decays with time during the thermalization process. Qualitative features of the time dependence of this non-equil…
We present a first-principle study of anomaly induced transport phenomena by performing real-time lattice simulations with dynamical fermions coupled simultaneously to non-Abelian $SU(N_c)$ and Abelian $U(1)$ gauge fields. Investigating the behavior of vector and axial currents during a sphaleron transition in the presence of an external magnetic field, we demonstrate how the interplay of the Chiral magnetic (CME) and Chiral separation effect (CSE) lead to the formation of a propagating wave. We further analyze the dependence of the magnitude of the induced vector current and the propagation o…
In heavy-ion collisions, an interesting question of phenomenological relevance is how the chiral imbalance generated at early times persists through a fluctuating background of sphalerons in addition to other "non-anomalous" interactions with the QGP. To address this question, we construct a relativistic chiral kinetic theory using the world-line formulation of quantum field theory. We outline how Berry's phase arises in this framework, and how its effects can be clearly distinguished from those arising from the chiral anomaly. We further outline how this framework can be matched to classical …
We study the two-flavor Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model with the Polyakov loop (PNJL model) in the presence of a strong magnetic field and a chiral chemical potential $μ_5$ which mimics the effect of imbalanced chirality due to QCD instanton and/or sphaleron transitions. Firstly we focus on the properties of chiral symmetry breaking and deconfinement crossover under the strong magnetic field. Then we discuss the role of $μ_5$ on the phase structure. Finally the chirality charge, electric current, and their susceptibility, which are relevant to the Chiral Magnetic Effect, are computed in the model.
We investigate the $B+L$ violation process by performing three-dimensional lattice simulations in an electroweak theory with first-order phase transition and the electroweak sphaleron decay. The simulation results indicate that the Chern-Simons number changes along with the helical magnetic field production when the sphaleron decay occurs. Our study suggests that, for the electroweak phase transition with nucleation rate being smaller than $\sim \mathcal{O}(10)$, the helical magnetic field with the fractional magnetic helicity $ε_M\leq 0.2$ can be probed by Cherenkov Telescope Array through th…
With increasing temperatures, Schwinger pair production changes from a quantum tunnelling to a classical, thermal process, determined by a worldline sphaleron. We show this and calculate the corresponding rate of pair production for both spinor and scalar quantum electrodynamics, including the semiclassical prefactor. For electron-positron pair production from a thermal bath of photons and in the presence of an electric field, the rate we derive is faster than both perturbative photon fusion and the zero temperature Schwinger process. We work to all-orders in the coupling and hence our results…
We propose a framework where a phase transition associated with a gauge symmetry breaking that occurs (not far) above the electroweak scale sets a stage for baryogenesis similar to the electroweak baryogenesis in the Standard Model. A concrete realization utilizes the breaking of $SU(2)_R \times U(1)_X \rightarrow U(1)_Y$. New chiral fermions charged under the extended gauge symmetry have nonzero lepton numbers, which makes the $B-L$ symmetry anomalous. The new lepton sector contains a large flavor-dependent CP violation, similar to the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa phase, without inducing sizable…
A quark interaction with topologically nontrivial gluonic fields, instantons and sphalerons, violates ¶~ and \CP~ symmetry. In the strong magnetic field of a noncentral nuclear collision such interactions lead to the charge separation along the magnetic field, the so-called chiral magnetic effect (CME). Recent results from the STAR collaboration on charge dependent correlations are consistent with theoretical expectations for CME but may have contributions from other effects, which prevents definitive interpretation of the data. Here I propose to use central body-body $U+U$ collisions to disen…
The rate of vacuum changing topological solutions of the gluon field, sphalerons, is estimated to be large at the typical temperatures of heavy-ion collisions, particularly at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Such windings in the gluon field are expected to produce parity-odd bubbles, which cause separation of positively and negatively charged quarks along the axis of the external magnetic field. This chiral magnetic effect can be mimicked by Chern-Simons modified electromagnetism. Here we present a model of relativistic hydrodynamics including the effects of axial anomalies via the Chern-…
The generation of the observed baryon asymmetry may have taken place during the electroweak phase transition, thus involving physics testable at LHC, a scenario dubbed electroweak baryogenesis. In this paper we point out that the magnetic field which is produced in the bubbles of a first order phase transition endangers the baryon asymmetry produced in the bubble walls. The reason being that the produced magnetic field couples to the sphaleron magnetic moment and lowers the sphaleron energy; this strengthens the sphaleron transitions inside the bubbles and triggers a more effective wash out of…
We study simultaneous evolution of large scale hypermagnetic fields and the asymmetries of quarks, leptons and Higgs boson in the temperature range from 10TeV to 100GeV. Above 10TeV, we identify all of the major fast interactions and use the associated conservation laws as constraints on the initial conditions at 10TeV. Below 10TeV, we identify the major processes which fall out of equilibrium or emerge as non-negligible processes and derive the relevant evolution equations. These include the Abelian anomalies which violate fermion numbers, direct and inverse Higgs decays that change the chira…
We compute the QCD phase diagram in the plane of the chiral chemical potential and temperature using the linear sigma model coupled to quarks and to the Polyakov loop. The chiral chemical potential accounts for effects of imbalanced chirality due to QCD sphaleron transitions which may emerge in heavy-ion collisions. We found three effects caused by the chiral chemical potential: the imbalanced chirality (i) tightens the link between deconfinement and chiral phase transitions; (ii) lowers the common critical temperature; (iii) strengthens the order of the phase transition by converting the cros…
We present a real-time lattice approach to study the non-equilibrium dynamics of vector and axial charges in $SU(N) \times U(1)$ gauge theories. Based on a classical description of the non-Abelian and Abelian gauge fields, we include dynamical fermions and develop operator definitions for (improved) Wilson and overlap fermions that allow us to study real-time manifestations of the axial anomaly from first principles. We present a first application of this approach to anomalous transport phenomena such as the Chiral Magnetic Effect (CME) and Chiral Separation Effect (CSE) by studying the dynami…
We investigate the vector-current correlation Pi_{mu nu} (VCC) in the presence of a strong external magnetic field (B_0 in the z direction) at low temperature (T<T^chi_c) with C- and CP-violations, indicated by the nonzero chiral-chemical potential (mu_chi>0), i.e. the chiral-magnetic effect (CME). For this purpose, we employ the instanton-vacuum configuration at finite T with nonzero topological charge (Q_t>0). From the numerical calculations, it turns out that the longitudinal component of the connected VCC is liner in B_0 and shows a bump, representing a corresponding vector meson at |Q|=(3…
We report on an exploratory lattice study on the phenomenon of chiral instabilities in non-Abelian gauge theories at high temperature. It is based on a recently constructed anomalous Langevin-type effective theory of classical soft gauge fields in the presence of a chiral number density $n_5=n_{\rm R}-n_{\rm L}$. Evaluated in thermal equilibrium using classical lattice techniques it reveals that the fluctuating soft fields indeed exhibit a rapid energy increase at early times and we observe a clear dependence of the diffusion rate of topological charge (sphaleron rate) on the the initial $n_5$…
We discuss the formation of quarkyonic chiral spirals in the presence of a magnetic field. The explicit breaking of the rotational symmetry by the external magnetic field gives rise to an additional chiral spiral that varies along the field direction and rotates in the chiral space between pion and magnetic moment components.
We elaborate upon the model of baryogenesis from decaying magnetic helicity by focusing on the evolution of the baryon number and magnetic field through the Standard Model electroweak crossover. The baryon asymmetry is determined by a competition between the helical hypermagnetic field, which sources baryon number, and the electroweak sphaleron, which tends to wash out baryon number. At the electroweak crossover both of these processes become inactive; the hypermagnetic field is converted into an electromagnetic field, which does not source baryon number, and the weak gauge boson masses grow, …
Chiral anomalous effects in relativistic plasmas are reviewed. The essence of chiral separation and chiral magnetic effects is explained in simple terms. Qualitative differences between the two phenomena, both of which are triggered by background electromagnetic fields, are highlighted. It is shown how an interplay of the chiral separation and chiral magnetic effects could lead to a new collective plasma mode, called the chiral magnetic wave. It is argued that the chiral magnetic wave is overdamped in weakly interacting plasmas. Its fate in a strongly interacting quark-gluon plasma is less cle…
The effects of chiral imbalance and external magnetic field on pion superfluidity and color superconductivity are investigated in extended Nambu--Jona-Lasinio models. We take Schwinger approach to treat the interaction between charged pion condensate and magnetic field at finite isospin density and include simultaneously the chiral imbalance and magnetic field at finite baryon density. For the superfluidity, the chiral imbalance and magnetic field lead to catalysis and inverse catalysis effects, respectively. For the superconductivity, the chiral imbalance enhances the critical baryon density,…
I discuss the electrical conductivity, bulk viscosity, and heavy-quark diffusion coefficient in strong magnetic fields putting emphasis on consequences of the chirality conservation on the perturbative relaxation dynamics.
The chiral symmetry breaking in a Nambu-Jona-Lasinio effective model of quarks in the presence of a magnetic field is investigated. We show that new interaction tensor channels open up via Fierz identities due to the explicit breaking of the rotational symmetry by the magnetic field. We demonstrate that the magnetic catalysis of chiral symmetry breaking leads to the generation of two independent condensates, the conventional chiral condensate and a spin-one condensate. While the chiral condensate generates, as usual, a dynamical fermion mass, the new condensate enters as a dynamical anomalous …
We study the phase diagram of the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model in the external magnetic field within the mean-field approximation, taking into account the inhomogeneous chiral condensate. It is shown that there appears a new type of the chiral condensate, endowed with two features of real kink crystal and dual chiral density wave, in the magnetic field. We also show that there are first order phase transitions between different inhomogeneous phases in the presence of magnetic field.
We study the modification of the chiral phase structure of QCD due to an external magnetic field. We first demonstrate how the effect of magnetic field can systematically be incorporated into a generalized Ginzburg-Landau framework. We then analyze the phase structure in the vicinity of the chiral critical point. In the chiral limit, the effect is found to be so drastic that it totally washes the tricritical point out of the phase diagram, bringing the continent for the chiral spiral. This is the case no matter how small is the intensity of the magnetic field. On the other hand, the current qu…
We first compare different approaches to estimates of the magnitude of the chiral magnetic effect in relativistic heavy ion collisions and show that their main difference lies in the assumptions on the length of persistence of the magnetic field generated by the colliding nuclei. We then analyze recent measurements of the global polarization of $Λ$ and $\bar Λ$ hyperons in terms of the bounds they set on the magnitude of the late time magnetic field.
In [1], we demonstrated that the structure function $g_1(x_B,Q^2)$ measured in polarized deeply inelastic scattering (DIS) is dominated by the triangle anomaly in both the Bjorken limit of large $Q^2$ and the Regge limit of small $x_B$. In the worldline formulation of quantum field theory, the triangle anomaly arises from the imaginary part of the worldline effective action. We show explicitly how a Wess-Zumino-Witten term coupling the topological charge density to a primordial isosinglet ${\bar η}$ arises in this framework. We demonstrate the fundamental role played by this contribution both …
We construct the multi-charge generalizations for the electroweak magnetic monopole solution of Cho and Maison within a wide range of values of the magnetic charge. We use the same ansatz for the axially symmetric fields as the one previously employed to construct the electroweak sphalerons and compare the internal structure of monopoles with that of sphalerons. The monopoles have zero dipole moment but a finite quadrupole momentum that rapidly increases with growing magnetic charge. For large charges, the monopole configurations are strongly squashed and show inside a bubble of symmetric phas…
We argue that the presence of a very strong magnetic field in the chirally broken phase induces inhomogeneous expectation values, of a spiral nature along the magnetic field axis, for the currents of charge and chirality, when there is finite baryon density or an imbalance between left and right chiralities. This "chiral magnetic spiral" is a gapless excitation transporting the currents of (i) charge (at finite chirality), and (ii) chirality (at finite baryon density) along the direction of the magnetic field. In both cases it also induces in the transverse directions oscillating currents of c…
The placement of a magnetic monopole into an electrically-neutral chiral plasma with a non-zero axial density results in an electric polarization of the matter. The electric current produced by the chiral magnetic effect is balanced by charge diffusion and Ohmic dissipation, which generates a non-trivial charge distribution. In turn, the latter induces a separation of chiralities along the magnetic field of the monopole due to the chiral separation effect. We find the stationary states of such a system, with vanishing total electric current and stationary axial current balanced by the chiral a…
We study the electrodynamics of a chiral medium with electric and magnetic charges using the effective Maxwell-Chern-Simons theory extended to include the magnetic current. The exchange of helicity between the chiral medium and the magnetic field, known as the inverse cascade, is controlled by the chiral anomaly equation. In the presence of the magnetic current, the magnetic helicity is dissipated, so that the inverse cascade stops when the magnetic helicity vanishes while the chiral conductivity reaches a non-vanishing stationary value satisfying $σ_χ^2< 4σ_eσ_m$, where $σ_e$, $σ_m$ and $σ_χ$…
In this thesis, we study the novel dynamic critical phenomena induced by superfluidity and the chiral magnetic effect in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), respectively. In particular, we find the new dynamic universality class of the high-density QCD critical point between the nuclear and quark superfluid phases beyond the conventional Hohnenberg and Halperin's classification. We also consider the second-order chiral phase transition under an external magnetic field and find that the inclusion of the chiral magnetic effect changes the dynamic universality class from the model E into model A within…
The (3+1)D relativistic hydrodynamics with chiral anomaly is used to obtain a quantitative description of the chiral magnetic effect (CME) in heavy-ion collisions. We find that the charge-dependent hadron azimuthal correlations are sensitive to the CME, and that the experimental observations are consistent with the presence of the effect.
We have computed the chiral susceptibility in quark-gluon plasma in presence of finite chemical potential and weak magnetic field within hard thermal loop approximation. First we construct the massive effective quark propagator in a thermomagnetic medium. Then we obtain completely analytic expression for the chiral susceptibility in weak magnetic field approximation. In the absence of magnetic field the thermal chiral susceptibility increases in presence of finite chemical potential. The effect of thermomagnetic correction is found to be very marginal as temperature is the dominant scale in we…
In this paper, we shall address some field theoretic issues regarding the chiral magnetic effect. The general structure of the magnetic current consistent with the electromagnetic gauge invariance is obtained and the impact of the infrared divergence is examined. Some subtleties on the relation between the chiral magnetic effect and the axial anomaly are clarified through a careful examination of the infrared limit of the relevant thermal diagrams.
We introduce a new mechanism for the chiral magnetic effect that does not require an initial chirality imbalance. The chiral magnetic current is generated by reconnections of magnetic flux that change the magnetic helicity of the system. The resulting current is entirely determined by the change of magnetic helicity, and it is quantized.
