Collective phenomena in chirally imbalanced medium

TL;DR

This paper investigates the collective behavior of a chirally imbalanced medium by calculating gluon polarization, dispersion relations, instabilities, and heavy-quark potential modifications, revealing polarization splitting and enhanced quarkonium suppression.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of gluon dynamics, instabilities, and quarkonium suppression in a chirally imbalanced plasma using thermal field theory and numerical solutions.

Findings

Transverse gluon modes split into circular polarizations.

Instabilities are identified through imaginary poles of the propagator.

Quarkonium suppression is enhanced due to reduced screening and increased decay width.

Abstract

We calculate the gluon polarization tensor for a chirally imbalanced plasma using hard thermal loop approximation in the real time formulation of thermal field theory. The dispersion relations obtained from the poles of the effective gluon propagator are solved numerically as well as analytically in appropriate limiting cases. It is seen that the degenerate transverse modes split into left and right handed circularly polarized modes. We also compute imaginary poles of the propagator which signal the presence of instability in the plasma. Relevant time scales for development of such instabilities are discussed in detail. Furthermore, we compute both the real and imaginary parts of the static heavy-quark potential in the chirally imbalanced plasma and argue that quarkonium suppression is enhanced due to the combined effects of a reduced debye screening length and an increased decay width. In addition, we calculate the gluon spectral density, sum rules and residues for various cases, providing a comprehensive understanding of the collective behaviour of the medium.