Chiral magnetic wave

Abstract

We consider a relativistic plasma containing charged chiral fermions in an external magnetic field, e.g. a chirally symmetric quark-gluon plasma created in relativistic heavy ion collisions. We show that triangle anomalies imply the existence of a new type of collective gapless excitation in this system that stems from the coupling between the density waves of the electric and chiral charges; we call it ''the chiral magnetic wave'' (CMW). The CMW exists even in a neutral plasma, i.e. in the absence of the axial and vector chemical potentials. We demonstrate the existence of CMW and study its properties using three different approaches: i) relativistic magnetohydrodynamics; ii) dimensional reduction to (1+1) Sine-Gordon model, appropriate in a strong magnetic field; and iii) holographic QCD (Sakai-Sugimoto model), appropriate at strong coupling. We also briefly discuss the phenomenological implications of the CMW for heavy ion collisions.