The chiral magnetic effect is the generation of electric current induced by chirality imbalance in the presence of magnetic field. It is a macroscopic manifestation of the quantum anomaly in relativistic field theory of chiral fermions (massless spin $1/2$ particles with a definite projection of spin on momentum) -- a dramatic phenomenon arising from a collective motion of particles and antiparticles in the Dirac sea. The recent discovery of Dirac semimetals with chiral quasi-particles opens a fascinating possibility to study this phenomenon in condensed matter experiments. Here we report on the first observation of chiral magnetic effect through the measurement of magneto-transport in zirconium pentatelluride, ZrTe_5. Our angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy experiments show that this materials electronic structure is consistent with a 3D Dirac semimetal. We observe a large negative magnetoresistance when magnetic field is parallel with the current. The measured quadratic field dependence of the magnetoconductance is a clear indication of the chiral magnetic effect. The observed phenomenon stems from the effective transmutation of Dirac semimetal into a Weyl semimetal induced by the parallel electric and magnetic fields that represent a topologically nontrivial gauge field background.
The transverse momentum spectra of hadrons produced in high energy collisions can be decomposed into two components: the exponential (thermal) and the power (hard) ones. Recently, the H1 Collaboration has discovered that the relative strength of these two components in Deep Inelastic Scattering depends drastically upon the global structure of the event - namely, the exponential component is absent in the diffractive events characterized by a rapidity gap. We discuss the possible origin of this effect, and speculate that it is linked to confinement. Specifically, we argue that the thermal component is due to the effective event horizon introduced by the confining string, in analogy to the Hawking-Unruh effect. In diffractive events, the $t$-channel exchange is color-singlet and there is no fragmenting string -- so the thermal component is absent. The slope of the soft component of the hadron spectrum in this picture is determined by the saturation momentum that drives the deceleration in the color field, and thus the Hawking-Unruh temperature. We analyze the data on non-diffractive $pp$ collisions and find that the slope of the thermal component of the hadron spectrum is indeed proportional to the saturation momentum.
Topological charge changing transitions can induce chirality in the quark-gluon plasma by the axial anomaly. We study the equilibrium response of the quark-gluon plasma in such a situation to an external magnetic field. To mimic the effect of the topological charge changing transitions we will introduce a chiral chemical potential. We will show that an electromagnetic current is generated along the magnetic field. This is the Chiral Magnetic Effect. We compute the magnitude of this current as a function of magnetic field, chirality, temperature, and baryon chemical potential.
