Varying the chiral magnetic effect relative to flow in a single nucleus-nucleus collision

TL;DR

The paper introduces a new method to detect the chiral magnetic effect in heavy ion collisions by comparing magnetic field strength and flow background within a single collision, reducing systematic uncertainties.

Contribution

It proposes a novel approach to distinguish CME signals from flow background by exploiting their opposite behavior in a single nucleus-nucleus collision.

Findings

Applied method to RHIC data with discussion of results.

Demonstrated potential to isolate CME signal from flow background.

Suggested reduced systematic uncertainties in CME detection.

Abstract

We propose a novel method to search for the chiral magnetic effect (CME) in heavy ion collisions. We argue that the relative strength of the magnetic field (mainly from spectator protons and responsible for the CME) with respect to the reaction plane and the participant plane is opposite to that of the elliptic flow background arising from the fluctuating participant geometry. This opposite behavior in a single collision system, hence with small systematic uncertainties, can be exploited to extract the possible CME signal from the flow background. The method is applied to the existing data at RHIC, the outcome of which is discussed.