Observation of the chiral magnetic effect in ZrTe5

Understand

The chiral magnetic effect is the generation of electric current induced by chirality imbalance in the presence of magnetic field.

• It is a macroscopic manifestation of the quantum anomaly in relativistic field theory of chiral fermions (massless spin $1/2$ particles with a definite projection of spin on momentum) -- a dramatic phenomenon arising from a collective motion of particles and antiparticles in the Dirac sea.
• The recent discovery of Dirac semimetals with chiral quasi-particles opens a fascinating possibility to study this phenomenon in condensed matter experiments.
• Here we report on the first observation of chiral magnetic effect through the measurement of magneto-transport in zirconium pentatelluride, ZrTe_5.