Electromagnetic field and the chiral magnetic effect in the quark-gluon plasma

Time evolution of an electromagnetic field created in heavy-ion collisions strongly depends on the electromagnetic response of the quark-gluon plasma, which can be described by the Ohmic and chiral conductivities. The latter is intimately related to the chiral magnetic effect. I argue that a solution to the classical Maxwell equations at finite chiral conductivity is unstable due to the soft modes k < σχ that grow exponentially with time. In the kinematical region relevant for the relativistic heavy-ion collisions, I derive analytical expressions for the magnetic field of a point charge. I show that finite chiral conductivity causes oscillations of magnetic field at early times. Disciplines Astrophysics and Astronomy | Physics Comments This article is from Physical Review C 91 (2015): 064902, doi: 10.1103/PhysRevC.91.064902. Posted with permission. This article is available at Iowa State University Digital Repository: http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/physastro_pubs/124 PHYSICAL REVIEW C 91, 064902 (2015) Electromagnetic field and the chiral magnetic effect in the quark-gluon plasma Kirill Tuchin Department of Physics and Astronomy, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011, USA (Received 1 December 2014; revised manuscript received 27 January 2015; published 4 June 2015) Time evolution of an electromagnetic field created in heavy-ion collisions strongly depends on the electromagnetic response of the quark-gluon plasma, which can be described by the Ohmic and chiral conductivities. The latter is intimately related to the chiral magnetic effect. I argue that a solution to the classical Maxwell equations at finite chiral conductivity is unstable due to the soft modes k < σχ that grow exponentially with time. In the kinematical region relevant for the relativistic heavy-ion collisions, I derive analytical expressions for the magnetic field of a point charge. I show that finite chiral conductivity causes oscillations of magnetic field at early times. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevC.91.064902 PACS number(s): 25.75.−q, 24.85.+p