Collisional energy loss and the chiral magnetic effect
Date
2021-09-10
Authors
Hansen, Jeremy
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American Physical Society
Abstract
Collisional energy loss of a fast particle in a medium is mostly due to the medium polarization by the
electromagnetic fields of the particle. A small fraction of energy is carried away by the Cherenkov radiation.
In chiral medium there is an additional contribution to the energy loss due to induction of the anomalous
current proportional to the magnetic field. It causes the particle to lose energy mostly in the form of the chiral
Cherenkov radiation. We employ classical electrodynamics, adequate in a wide range of particle energies, to
compute the collisional energy loss by a fast particle in a homogenous chiral plasma and apply the results
to quark-gluon plasma and a Weyl semimetal. In the latter case photon spectrum is strongly enhanced in the
ultraviolet and x-ray regions which makes it amenable to experimental investigation. Our main observation is
that while the collisional energy loss in a nonchiral medium is a slow, at most logarithmic, function of energy
ε, the chiral Cherenkov radiation is proportional to ε2 when the recoil is neglected and to ε when it is taken
into account.
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This article is published as Hansen, Jeremy, and Kirill Tuchin. "Collisional energy loss and the chiral magnetic effect." Physical Review C 104, no. 3 (2021): 034903.
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevC.104.034903.
Copyright 2021 The Authors.
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
Posted with permission.