Chiral Magnetic Effect in Heavy Ion Collisions

Understand

The Chiral Magnetic Effect (CME) is a remarkable phenomenon that stems from highly nontrivial interplay of QCD chiral symmetry, axial anomaly, and gluonic topology.

• It is of fundamental importance to search for the CME in experiments.
• The heavy ion collisions provide a unique environment where a hot chiral-symmetric quark-gluon plasma is created, gluonic topological fluctuations generate chirality imbalance, and very strong magnetic fields $|\vec{\bf B}|\sim m_\pi^2$ are present during the early stage of such collisions.
• Significant efforts have been made to look for CME signals in heavy ion collision experiments.