Inverse Magnetic/Shear Catalysis

Understand

It is well known that very large magnetic fields are generated when the Quark-Gluon Plasma is formed during peripheral heavy-ion collisions.

• Lattice, holographic, and other studies strongly suggest that these fields may, for observationally relevant field values, induce "inverse magnetic catalysis", signalled by a lowering of the critical temperature for the chiral/deconfinement transition.
• The theoretical basis of this effect has recently attracted much attention; yet so far these investigations have not included another, equally dramatic consequence of the peripheral collision geometry: the QGP acquires a large angular momentum vector, parallel to the magnetic field.
• Here we use holographic techniques to argue that the angular momentum can also, independently, have an effect on transition temperatures, and we obtain a rough estimate of the relative effects of the presence of both a magnetic field and an angular momentum density.