2018-12-13  P7F

Collective modes in chiral plasmas with dynamical electromagnetism

Igor Shovkovy

Anomalous properties of chiral forms of matter attracted a lot of attention recently in the studies of the early Universe, relativistic heavy-ion collisions, and even condensed matter physics materials. In part, the interest is driven by an intriguing possibility of macroscopic realizations of the quantum chiral anomaly. In the context of relativistic heavy-ion collisions, in particular, several experiments have already reported tentative detections of predicted signals, albeit with significant background contributions. Here, I will report on the most recent study of chiral matter, showing that the commonly used background-field approximation is not sufficient for treating collective modes in the long-wavelength limit. I will show that this has profound implications for the strongly-coupled quark-gluon plasma created in heavy-ion collisions. After the inclusion of the electrical conductivity and charge diffusion effects, one of its predicted signature modes, the so-called chiral magnetic wave, becomes strongly overdamped.