42 research outputs found

    Chiral Anomalous Dispersion

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    The linearized Einstein equation describing graviton propagation through a chiral medium appears to be helicity dependent. We analyze features of the corresponding spectrum in a collision-less regime above a flat background. In the long wave-length limit, circularly polarized metric perturbations travel with a helicity dependent group velocity that can turn negative giving rise to a new type of an anomalous dispersion. We further show that this chiral anomalous dispersion is a general feature of polarized modes propagating through chiral plasmas extending our result to the electromagnetic sector.Comment: 13 pages

    Drag suppression in anomalous chiral media

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    We study a heavy impurity moving longitudinal with the direction of an external magnetic field in an anomalous chiral medium. Such system would carry a non-dissipative current of chiral magnetic effect associated with the anomaly. We show, by generalizing Landau's criterion for superfluidity, that the "anomalous component" which gives rise to the anomalous transport will {\it not} contribute to the drag experienced by an impurity. We argue on a very general basis that those systems with a strong magnetic field would exhibit an interesting transport phenomenon -- the motion of the heavy impurity is frictionless, in analogy to the case of a superfluid. We demonstrate and confirm our general results with two complementary examples: weakly coupled chiral fermion gases and strongly interacting chiral liquids.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, version accepted in PR

    Chiral Vortical Effect for Bosons

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    The thermal contribution to the chiral vortical effect is believed to be related to the axial anomaly in external gravitational fields. We use the universality of the spin-gravity interaction to extend this idea to a wider set of phenomena. We consider the Kubo formula at weak coupling for the spin current of a vector field and derive a novel anomalous effect caused by the medium rotation: the chiral vortical effect for bosons. The effect consists in a spin current of vector bosons along the angular velocity of the medium. We argue that it has the same anomalous nature as in the fermionic case and show that this effect provides a mechanism for helicity transfer, from flow helicity to magnetic helicity.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, version accepted in PR

    Anomalous Transport and Generalized Axial Charge

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    In this paper we continue studying the modification of the axial charge in chiral media by macroscopic helicities. Recently it was shown that magnetic reconnections result in a persistent current of zero mode along flux tubes. Here we argue that in general a change in the helical part of the generalized axial charge results in the same phenomenon. Thus one may say that there is a novel realization of chiral effects requiring no initial chiral asymmetry. The transfer of flow helicity to zero modes is analyzed in a toy model based on a vortex reconnection in a chiral superfluid. Then, we discuss the balance between the two competing processes effect of reconnections and the chiral instability on the example of magnetic helicity. We argue that in the general case there is a possibility for the distribution of the axial charge between the magnetic and fermionic forms at the end of the instability.Comment: 19 pages, version accepted in PR

    Jet shape modifications in holographic dijet systems

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    We present a coherent model that combines jet production from perturbative QCD with strongly-coupled jet-medium interactions described in holography. We use this model to study the modification of an ensemble of jets upon propagation through a quark-gluon plasma either resembling central heavy ion collisions or proton-ion collisions. Here the modification of the dijet asymmetry depends strongly on the subleading jet width, which can therefore be an important observable for studying jet-medium interactions. We furthermore show that the modification of the shape of the leading jet is relatively insensitive to the dijet asymmetry, whereas the subleading jet shape modification is much larger for more imbalanced dijets.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

    Drag force to all orders in gradients

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    We study the energy loss of a heavy quark slowly moving through an evolving strongly coupled plasma. We use the linearized fluid/gravity correspondence to describe small perturbations of the medium flow with general spacetime dependence. This all order linearized hydrodynamics results in a drag force exerted on a heavy quark even when it is at rest with the fluid element. We show how the general contribution to the drag force can be derived order by order in the medium velocity gradients and provide explicit results valid up to the third order. We then obtain an approximate semi-analytic result for the drag force to all orders in the gradient expansion but linearized in the medium velocity. Thus, the effects of a class of hydrodynamic gradients on the drag force are re-summed, giving further insight into the dissipative properties of strongly coupled plasmas. The all order result allows us to study the drag force in the non-hydrodynamic regime of linear medium perturbations that vary rapidly in space and time.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures. v2: Journal version, references and figure adde

    Evolution of the Mean Jet Shape and Dijet Asymmetry Distribution of an Ensemble of Holographic Jets in Strongly Coupled Plasma

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    Some of the most important probes of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) produced in heavy ion collisions come from the analysis of how the shape and energy of jets are modified by passage through QGP. We model an ensemble of back-to-back dijets to gain a qualitative understanding of how the shapes of the individual jets and the asymmetry in the energy of the pairs of jets are modified by passage through an expanding droplet of strongly coupled plasma, as modeled in a holographic gauge theory. We do so by constructing an ensemble of strings in the gravitational description of the gauge theory. We model QCD jets in vacuum using strings whose endpoints move "downward" into the gravitational bulk spacetime with some fixed small angle that represents the opening angle (ratio of jet mass to jet energy) that the QCD jet would have in vacuum. Such strings must be moving through the gravitational bulk at (close to) the speed of light; they must be (close to) null. This condition does not specify the energy distribution along the string, meaning that it does not specify the shape of the jet being modeled. We study the dynamics of strings that are initially not null and show that strings with a wide range of initial conditions rapidly accelerate and become null and, as they do, develop a similar distribution of their energy density. We use this distribution of the energy density along the string, choose an ensemble of strings whose opening angles and energies are distributed as in perturbative QCD, and show that we can then fix one model parameter such that the mean jet shape in our ensemble matches that measured in p-p collisions reasonably well. We send our strings through the plasma, choosing the second model parameter to get a reasonable suppression in the number of jets, and study how the mean jet shape and the dijet asymmetry are modified, comparing both to data from LHC heavy ion collisions.Comment: References added; 34 pages, 11 figure
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