Chiral magnetic effect

Chiral magnetic effect (CME) is the generation of electric current along an external magnetic field induced by chirality imbalance. The CME is a macroscopic quantum phenomenon present in systems with charged chiral fermions, such as the quark-gluon plasma, or Dirac and Weyl semimetals; for review, see.[1] The CME is a consequence of chiral anomaly in quantum field theory; unlike conventional superconductivity or superfluidity, it does not require a spontaneous symmetry breaking. The chiral magnetic current is non-dissipative, because it is topologically protected: the imbalance between the densities of left- and right-handed chiral fermions is linked to the topology of fields in gauge theory by the Atiyah-Singer index theorem.

The experimental observation of CME in a Dirac semimetal ZrTe5 was reported in 2014 by a group from Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University.[2][3] The STAR detector at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, Brookhaven National Laboratory [4] and ALICE: A Large Ion Collider Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN[5] presented an experimental evidence for the existence of CME in the quark-gluon plasma [6]

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