Novel mechanism for electric quadrupole moment generation in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Understand

We present the spatial distributions of electromagnetic fields ($\bf E$ and $\bf B$) and electromagnetic anomaly $ \bf E \cdot B$ in Au+Au collisions at the RHIC energy $\sqrt{s}$=200 GeV based on a multi-phase transport model.

• A dipolar distribution of $\bf E \cdot B$ is observed in non-central collisions.
• We find that the coupling of the $\bf E \cdot B$ dipole and magnetic field $\bf B$ can induce an electric quadrupole moment which can further lead to the difference in elliptic flows between positive charged particles and negative charged particles through final interactions.
• The centrality dependence of the density of $\bf E \cdot B$ is similar to the trend of the slope parameter $r$ measured from the difference in elliptic flows between positive pions and negative pions by the STAR collaboration.