A systematic formulation of chiral anomalous magnetohydrodynamics

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive theoretical framework for chiral anomalous magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) that includes effects like the chiral magnetic and separation effects, predicting new wave phenomena and analyzing chiral instabilities.

Contribution

It provides a systematic derivation of chiral anomalous MHD incorporating multiple chiral effects within a unified theory, extending previous models.

Findings

Chiral magnetic wave does not persist with dynamical electromagnetic fields.

A new wave, the chiral magnetic electric separation wave, is predicted with a calculable velocity.

A simple nonlinear model explores the conditions for chiral instability.

Abstract

We present a new way of deriving effective theories of dynamical electromagnetic fields in general media. It can be used to give a systematic formulation of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) with strong magnetic fields, including systems with chiral matter and Adler-Bell-Jackiw (ABJ) anomaly. We work in the regime in which velocity and temperature fluctuations can be neglected. The resulting chiral anomalous MHD incorporates and generalizes the chiral magnetic effect, the chiral separation effect, the chiral electric separation effect, as well as recently derived strong-field MHD, all in a single coherent framework. At linearized level, the theory predicts that the chiral magnetic wave does not survive dynamical electromagnetic fields. A different chiral wave, to which we refer as the chiral magnetic electric separation wave, emerges as a result of dynamical versions of the chiral electric separation effect and the chiral magnetic effect. We predict its wave velocity. We also introduce a simple, but solvable nonlinear model to explore the fate of the chiral instability.