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. © 2010 The American Physical Society.
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