Test the chiral magnetic effect with isobaric collisions

Understand

The quark-gluon matter produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions may contain local domains in which P and CP symmetries are not preserved.

• When coupled with an external magnetic field, such P- and CP-odd domains will generate electric currents along the magnetic field --- a phenomenon called the chiral magnetic effect (CME).
• Recently, the STAR Collaboration at RHIC and the ALICE Collaboration at the LHC released data of charge-dependent azimuthal-angle correlators with features consistent with the CME expectation.
• However, the experimental observable is contaminated with significant background contributions from elliptic-flow-driven effects, which makes the interpretation of the data ambiguous.