Numerical study of chiral magnetic effect in quenched SU(2) lattice gauge theory

TL;DR

This study uses lattice gauge theory simulations to investigate the chiral magnetic effect, revealing how magnetic fields influence quark charge separation and fluctuations at different temperatures.

Contribution

It provides the first lattice gauge theory analysis of the chiral magnetic effect in SU(2) gluodynamics with a chirally invariant Dirac operator, highlighting temperature-dependent behaviors.

Findings

Magnetic fields increase local electric current and chirality fluctuations at zero temperature.

External magnetic fields cause spatial separation of quark charges, which grows with field strength.

In the deconfinement phase, fluctuations are large and less dependent on magnetic field strength.

Abstract

A possible experimental observation of the chiral magnetic effect in heavy ion collisions at RHIC was recently reported by the STAR Collaboration. We study signatures of this effect in SU(2) lattice gluodynamics with the chirally invariant Dirac operator. We find that at zero temperature the local fluctuations of an electric current of quarks and chirality fluctuations increase with external Abelian magnetic field. The external magnetic field leads to spatial separation of the quark's electric charges. The separation increases with the strength of the magnetic field. As temperature gets higher the dependence of these quantities on the strength of the magnetic field becomes weaker. In the deconfinement phase the local fluctuations of the chiral density and of the spatial components of the quarks electric current are large and are almost independent on the external magnetic field. The local fluctuations of the electric charge density decrease with the strength of the magnetic field in this phase.