Investigating the quark flavor dependence of the chiral magnetic effect with a multiphase transport model

TL;DR

This study uses a multiphase transport model to explore how the chiral magnetic effect varies with quark flavor number, aiming to interpret experimental charge correlation data from heavy-ion collisions.

Contribution

It introduces a method to simulate flavor-dependent CME effects in a transport model and compares with experimental data to identify potential flavor dependence.

Findings

Data shows potential to distinguish two-flavor and three-flavor CME scenarios.

Further data collection is needed to clarify flavor dependence.

The model provides a new approach to study flavor effects in QCD phenomena.

Abstract

Because the properties of the QCD phase transition and the chiral magnetic effect (CME) depend on the number of quark flavors ($N_{f}$) and quark mass, relativistic heavy-ion collisions provide a natural environment to investigate the flavor features if quark deconfinement occurs. We introduce an initial two-flavor or three-flavor dipole charge separation into a multiphase transport (AMPT) model to investigate the flavor dependence of the CME. By taking advantage of the recent ALICE data of charge azimuthal correlations with identified hadrons, we attempt to disentangle two-flavor and three-flavor CME scenarios in Pb+Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV. We find that the experimental data show a certain potential to distinguish the two scenarios, therefore we further suggest to collect more data to clarify the possible flavor dependence in future experiments.