No Arabic abstract
The chiral magnetic effect (CME) is an exact statement that connects via the axial anomaly the electric current in a system consisting of interacting fermions and gauge field with chirality imbalance that is put into a strong external magnetic field. Experimental search of the magnetically induced current in QCD in heavy ion collisions above a pseudocritical temperature hints, though not yet conclusive, that the induced current is either small or vanishing. This would imply that the chirality imbalance in QCD above $T_c$ that could be generated via topological fluctuations is at most very small. Here we present the most general reason for absence (smallness) of the chirality imbalance in QCD above Tc. It was recently found on the lattice that QCD above Tc is approximately chiral spin (CS) symmetric with the symmetry breaking at the level of a few percent. The CS transformations mix the right- and left-handed components of quarks. Then an exact CS symmetry would require absence of any chirality imbalance. Consequently an approximate CS symmetry admits at most a very small chirality imbalance in QCD above Tc. Hence the absence or smallness of an magnetically induced current observed in heavy ion collisions could be considered as experimental evidence for emergence of the CS symmetry above Tc.
A distinctive feature of the presence of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in QCD is the condensation of low modes of the Dirac operator near the origin. The rate of condensation must be equal to the slope of (Mpi^2 Fpi^2)/2 with respect to the quark mass m in the chiral limit, where Mpi and Fpi are the mass and the decay constant of the Nambu-Goldstone bosons. We compute the spectral density of the (Hermitian) Dirac operator, the quark mass, the pseudoscalar meson mass and decay constant by numerical simulations of lattice QCD with two light degenerate Wilson quarks. We use CLS lattices at three values of the lattice spacing in the range 0.05-0.08 fm, and for several quark masses corresponding to pseudoscalar mesons masses down to 190 MeV. Thanks to this coverage of parameters space, we can extrapolate all quantities to the chiral and continuum limits with confidence. The results show that the low quark modes do condense in the continuum as expected by the Banks-Casher mechanism, and the rate of condensation agrees with the Gell-Mann-Oakes-Renner (GMOR) relation. For the renormalisation-group-invariant ratios we obtain [Sigma^RGI]^(1/3)/F =2.77(2)(4) and Lambda^MSbar/F = 3.6(2), which correspond to [Sigma^MSbar(2 GeV)]^(1/3) =263(3)(4) MeV and F=85.8(7)(20) MeV if FK is used to set the scale by supplementing the theory with a quenched strange quark.
The breaking of chiral symmetry in holographic light-front QCD is encoded in its longitudinal dynamics with its chiral limit protected by the superconformal algebraic structure which governs its transverse dynamics. The scale in the longitudinal light-front Hamiltonian determines the confinement strength in this direction: It is also responsible for most of the light meson ground state mass consistent with the Gell-Mann-Oakes-Renner constraint. Longitudinal confinement and the breaking of chiral symmetry are found to be different manifestations of the same underlying dynamics like in t Hooft large $N_C$ QCD(1 + 1) model.
Recently, via calculation of spatial correlators of $J=0,1$ isovector operators using a chirally symmetric Dirac operator within $N_F=2$ QCD, it has been found that QCD at temperatures $T_c - 3 T_c$ is approximately $SU(2)_{CS}$ and $SU(4)$ symmetric. The latter symmetry suggests that the physical degrees of freedom are chirally symmetric quarks bound by the chromoelectric field into color singlet objects without chromomagnetic effects. This regime of QCD has been referred to as a Stringy Fluid. Here we calculate correlators for propagation in time direction at a temperature slightly above $T_c$ and find the same approximate symmetries. This means that the meson spectral function is chiral-spin and $SU(4)$ symmetric.
The nucleon is naturally viewed as a bipartite system of valence spin -- defined by its non-vanishing chiral charge -- and non-valence or sea spin. The sea spin can be traced over to give a reduced density matrix, and it is shown that the resulting entanglement entropy acts as an order parameter of chiral symmetry breaking in the nucleon. In the large-$N_c$ limit, the entanglement entropy vanishes and the valence spin accounts for all of the nucleon spin, while in the limit of maximal entanglement entropy, the nucleon loses memory of the valence spin and consequently has spin dominated by the sea. The nucleon state vector in the chiral basis, fit to low-energy data, gives a valence spin content consistent with experiment and lattice QCD determinations, and has large entanglement entropy.
Above a pseudocritical temperature of chiral symmetry restoration T_c the energy and the pressure are very far from the quark-gluon-plasma limit (i.e. ideal gas of free quarks and gluons). At the same time very soon above T_c fluctuations of conserved charges behave as if quarks were free particles. Within the T_c - 3T_c interval a chiral spin symmetry emerges in QCD which is not consistent with free quarks and suggests that degrees of freedom are chirally symmetric quarks bound into the color-singlet objects by the chromoelectric field. Here we analyse temporal and spatial correlators in this interval and demonstrate that they indicate simultaneously the chiral spin symmetry as well as absence of the interquark interactions in channels constrained by a current conservation. The latter channels are responsible for both fluctuations of conserved charges and for dileptons. Assuming that a SU(2)_color subgroup of SU(3)_color is deconfined soon above T_c but confinement persits in SU(3)_color/SU(2)_color in the interval T_c - 3T_c we are able to reconcile all empirical facts listed above.