Anomalous Magneto Response and the St\"uckelberg Axion in Holography

TL;DR

This paper investigates anomalous magneto response phenomena in holography with non-conserved currents modeled by massive vector fields, revealing how these effects generalize and connect to realistic QCD dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a gauge-invariant mass for vector fields via the St"uckelberg mechanism in holography, extending anomalous transport phenomena to non-conserved currents.

Findings

Chiral Magnetic Effect vanishes for all non-zero masses.

Chiral Separation Effect remains fully present regardless of mass.

Negative magneto resistivity grows quadratically with magnetic field.

Abstract

We study the magneto response with non-conserved currents in Holography. Non-conserved currents are dual to massive vector fields in AdS. We introduce the mass in a gauge invariant way via the St\"uckelberg mechanism. In particular we find generalizations of the Chiral Magnetic Effect, the Chiral Separation Effect and the Chiral Magnetic Wave. Since the associated charge is not conserved we need to source it explicitly by a coupling, the generalization of the chemical potential. In this setup we find that in general the anomalous transport phenomena are still realized. The values we find for non-zero mass connect however continuously to the values of the anomalous conductivities of the consistent currents. i.e. the proper chiral magnetic effect vanishes for all masses (as it does for the consistent current in the zero mass case) whereas the chiral separation effect is fully present. The generalization of the chiral magnetic wave shows that for small momenta there is no propagating wave but two purely absorptive modes (one of them diffusive). At higher momenta we recover the chiral magnetic wave as a combination of the two absorptive modes. We also study the negative magneto resistivity and find that it grows quadratically with the magnetic field. Since the (classical) $U(1)_A$ symmetry of QCD is not at all a symmetry at the quantum level we also argue that using massive vectors in AdS to model the axial singlet current might result in a more realistic holographic model of QCD and should be a good starting point to investigate the dynamics of anomalous transport in the strongly coupled quark gluon plasma.