Magnetic fields in heavy ion collisions: flow and charge transport

Understand

At the earliest times after a heavy-ion collision, the magnetic field created by the spectator nucleons will generate an extremely strong, albeit rapidly decreasing in time, magnetic field.

• The impact of this magnetic field may have detectable consequences, and is believed to drive anomalous transport effects like the Chiral Magnetic Effect (CME).
• We detail an exploratory study on the effects of a dynamical magnetic field on the hydrodynamic medium created in the collisions of two ultrarelativistic heavy-ions, using the framework of numerical ideal MagnetoHydroDynamics (MHD) with the ECHO-QGP code.
• In this study, we consider a magnetic field captured in a conducting medium, where the conductivity can receive contributions from the electromagnetic conductivity $\sigma$ and the chiral magnetic conductivity $\sigma_{\chi}$.