Magnetic knots of deconfined CP-odd matter in heavy-ion collisions

2 pages, 1 figure; poster presented at 35th International Conference of High Energy Physics (ICHEP 2010), July 22-28, 2010, Paris, FranceInternational audienceWe point out that metastable knots of deconfined hot quark matter may exist in the quark-gluon plasma due to local parity violating effects. These knots are stabilized by strong magnetic fields which induce electric currents via the chiral magnetic effect. The magnetic field in the knot resembles the spheromak plasma state which appears in the nuclear fusion devices. The size of the knot is inversely proportional to the chiral conductivity of the plasma, and the parity and charge-parity symmetries are broken inside the knot. We argue that these knots may be created in noncentral heavy-ion collisions

Zero-point fluctuations in rotation: Perpetuum mobile of the fourth kind without energy transfer

International audienceWe discuss a simple Casimir-type device for which the rotational energy reaches its global minimum when the device rotates about a certain axis rather than remains static. This unusual property is a direct consequence of the fact that the moment of inertia of zero-point vacuum fluctuations is a negative quantity (the rotational vacuum effect). Moreover, the device does not produce any work despite the fact that its equilibrium ground state corresponds to a permanent rotation. Counterintuitively, the device has no internally moving mechanical parts while its very existence is consistent with the laws of thermodynamics. We point out that such devices may possibly be constructed using carbon nanotubes. We call this "zero-point-driven" device as the perpetuum mobile of the fourth kind

Superconducting properties of vacuum in strong magnetic field

International audienceWe discuss superconducting phases of vacuum induced by strong magnetic field in the electroweak model and in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) at zero temperature. In these phases, the vacuum behaves as an anisotropic inhomogeneous superconductor which supports superconductivity along the axis of the magnetic field while in the transversal directions, the superconductivity does not exist. The magnetic-field-induced anisotropic superconductivity appears as a result of condensation of electrically charged spin-one particles, which are elementary W bosons in the case of the electroweak model and composite quark-antiquark pairs with quantum numbers of ρ -mesons in the case of QCD. Due to the anisotropic nature of superconductivity, the Meissner effect is absent. Intrinsic inhomogeneities of the superconducting ground state are characterized by ensembles of certain topological vortices in an analogy with a mixed Abrikosov state of a type-II superconductivit

Anomalous dispersion, superluminality, and instabilities in two-flavor theories with local non-Hermitian mass mixing

Pseudo-Hermitian field theories possess a global continuous “similarity” symmetry, interconnecting the theories with the same physical particle content and an identical mass spectrum. In their regimes with real spectra, within this family of similarity transformations, there is a map from the non-Hermitian theory to its Hermitian similarity partner. We promote the similarity transformation to a local symmetry, which requires the introduction of a new vector similarity field as a connection in the similarity space of non-Hermitian theories. In the case of non-Hermitian two-flavor scalar or fermion mixing and by virtue of a novel IR/UV mixing effect, the effect of inhomogeneous non-Hermiticity then reveals itself via anomalous dispersion, instabilities, and superluminal group velocities at very high momenta, thus setting an upper bound on the particle momentum propagating through inhomogeneous backgrounds characterized by Lagrangians with non-Hermitian mass matrices. Such a non-Hermitian extension of the Standard Model of particle physics, encoded in a weak inhomogeneity of the non-Hermitian part of the fermion mass matrix, may nevertheless provide us with a low-energy particle spectrum consistent with experimentally observed properties.<br/

IR/UV mixing from local similarity maps of scalar non-Hermitian field theories

We propose to "gauge" the group of similarity transformations that acts on a space of non-Hermitian scalar theories. We introduce the "similarity gauge field", which acts as a gauge connection on the space of non-Hermitian theories characterized by (and equivalent to a Hermitian) real-valued mass spectrum. This extension leads to new effects: if the mass matrix is not the same in distant regions of space, but its eigenvalues coincide pairwise in both regions, the particle masses stay constant in the whole spacetime, making the model indistinguishable from a standard, low-energy and scalar Hermitian one. However, contrary to the Hermitian case, the high-energy scalar particles become unstable at a particular wavelength determined by the strength of the emergent similarity gauge field. This instability corresponds to momentum-dependent exceptional points, whose locations cannot be identified from an analysis of the eigenvalues of the coordinate-dependent squared mass matrix in isolation, as one might naively have expected. For a doublet of scalar particles with masses of the order of 1 MeV and a similarity gauge rotation of order unity at distances of 1 meter, the corrections to the masses are about 10^{-7}eV, which makes no experimentally detectable imprint on the low-energy spectrum. However, the instability occurs at 10^{18} eV, suggestively in the energy range of detectable ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, thereby making this truly non-Hermitian effect and its generalizations of phenomenological interest for high-energy particle physics.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures; v2 matches the published versio

Anomalous dispersion, superluminality and instabilities in two-flavour theories with local non-Hermitian mass mixing

Pseudo-Hermitian field theories possess a global continuous ``similarity'' symmetry, interconnecting the theories with the same physical particle content and an identical mass spectrum. In their regimes with real spectra, within this family of similarity transformations, there is a map from the non-Hermitian theory to its Hermitian similarity partner. We promote the similarity transformation to a local symmetry, which requires the introduction of a new vector similarity field as a connection in the similarity space of non-Hermitian theories. In the case of non-Hermitian two-flavour scalar or fermion mixing, and by virtue of a novel IR/UV mixing effect, the effect of inhomogeneous non-Hermiticity then reveals itself via anomalous dispersion, instabilities and superluminal group velocities at very high momenta, thus setting an upper bound on the particle momentum propagating through inhomogeneous backgrounds characterised by Lagrangians with non-Hermitian mass matrices. Such a non-Hermitian extension of the Standard Model of particle physics, encoded in a weak inhomogeneity of the non-Hermitian part of the fermion mass matrix, may nevertheless provide us with a low-energy particle spectrum consistent with experimentally observed properties.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figure

Numerical evidence of the axial magnetic effect

The axial magnetic field, which couples to left- and right-handed fermions with opposite signs, may generate an equilibrium dissipationless energy flow of fermions in the direction of the field even in the presence of interactions. We report on numerical observation of this axial magnetic effect in quenched SU(2) lattice gauge theory. We find that in the deconfinement (plasma) phase the energy flow grows linearly with the increase of the strength of the axial magnetic field. In the confinement (hadron) phase the axial magnetic effect is absent. Our study indirectly confirms the existence of the chiral vortical effect since both these effects have the same physical origin related to the presence of the gravitational anomaly

Temperature dependence of the axial magnetic effect in two-color quenched QCD

The axial magnetic effect is the generation of an equilibrium dissipationless energy flow of chiral fermions in the direction of the axial (chiral) magnetic field. At finite temperature the dissipationless energy transfer may be realized in the absence of any chemical potentials. We numerically study the temperature behavior of the axial magnetic effect in quenched SUd2_ lattice gauge theory. We show that in the confinement (hadron) phase the effect is absent. In the deconfinement transition region the conductivity quickly increases, reaching the asymptotic T2 behavior in a deep deconfinement (plasma) phase. Apart from an overall proportionality factor, our results qualitatively agree with theoretical predictions for the behavior of the energy flow as a function of temperature and strength of the axial magnetic field