7 research outputs found
Chiral drag force
We provide a holographic evaluation of novel contributions to the drag force
acting on a heavy quark moving through strongly interacting plasma. The new
contributions are chiral in that they act in opposite directions in plasmas
containing an excess of left- or right-handed quarks and in that they are
proportional to the coefficient of the axial anomaly. These new contributions
to the drag force act either parallel to or antiparallel to an external
magnetic field or to the vorticity of the fluid plasma. In all these respects,
these contributions to the drag force felt by a heavy quark are analogous to
the chiral magnetic effect on light quarks. However, the new contribution to
the drag force is independent of the electric charge of the heavy quark and is
the same for heavy quarks and antiquarks. We show that although the chiral drag
force can be non-vanishing for heavy quarks that are at rest in the local fluid
rest frame, it does vanish for heavy quarks that are at rest in a suitably
chosen frame. In this frame, the heavy quark at rest sees counterpropagating
momentum and charge currents, both proportional to the axial anomaly
coefficient, but feels no drag force. This provides strong concrete evidence
for the absence of dissipation in chiral transport, something that has been
predicted previously via consideration of symmetries. Along the way to our
principal results, we provide a general calculation of the corrections to the
drag force due to the presence of gradients in the flowing fluid in the
presence of a nonzero chemical potential. We close with a consequence of our
result that is at least in principle observable in heavy ion collisions, namely
an anticorrelation between the direction of the CME current for light quarks in
a given event and the direction of the kick given to the momentum of all the
heavy quarks and antiquarks in that event.Comment: 28 pages, small improvement to the discussion of gravitational
anomaly, references adde