Chiral magnetic effect (CME) is the generation of electric current along an external magnetic field induced by chirality imbalance. Fermions are said to be chiral if they keep a definite projection of spin quantum number on momentum. 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.[1] The CME is a consequence of chiral anomalyinquantum field theory; unlike conventional superconductivityorsuperfluidity, 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-handed 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 material showed a conductivity increase in the Lorentz force-free configuration of the parallel magnetic and electric fields.
In 2015, the STAR detectoratRelativistic 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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