English

Axial anomaly, Dirac sea, and the chiral magnetic effect

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2017-08-23 v1 Nuclear Theory

Abstract

Gribov viewed the axial anomaly as a manifestation of the collective motion of charged fermions with arbitrarily high momenta in the vacuum. In the presence of an external magnetic field and a chirality imbalance, this collective motion becomes directly observable in the form of the electric current - this is the chiral magnetic effect (CME). I give an elementary introduction into the physics of CME, and discuss some recent developments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1010.0943,
  title  = {Axial anomaly, Dirac sea, and the chiral magnetic effect},
  author = {Dmitri E. Kharzeev},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1010.0943},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

12 pages, to appear in the Proceedings of Gribov-80 Memorial conference, ICTP, Trieste, Italy, May 26-28, 2010