It is proposed to identify a strong electric field - created during relativistic collisions of asymmetric nuclei - via the observation of pseudorapidity and transverse momentum distributions of hadrons with the same mass but opposite charge. The results of detailed calculations within the Parton-Hadron String Dynamics (PHSD) approach for the charge-dependent directed flow $v_1$ are presented for semi-central Cu+Au collision at $sqrt{s_{NN}}=200$ GeV incorporating the inverse Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (iLPM) effect, which accounts for a delay in the electromagnetic interaction with the charged degree of freedom. Including the iLPM effect we achieve a reasonable agreement of the PHSD results for the charge splitting in $v_1(p_T)$ in line with the recent measurements of the STAR Collaboration for Cu+Au collisions at $sqrt{s_{NN}}=200$ GeV while an instant appearance and coupling of electric charges at the hard collision vertex overestimates the splitting by about a factor of 10. We predict that the iLPM effect should practically disappear at energies of $sqrt{s_{NN}} approx$9 GeV, which should lead to a significantly larger charge splitting of $v_1$ at the future FAIR/NICA facilities.
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