Paper detail

Signatures of Chiral Magnetic Effect in the Collisions of Isobars

Quantum anomaly is a fundamental feature of chiral fermions. In chiral materials the microscopic anomaly leads to nontrivial macroscopic transport processes such as the Chiral Magnetic Effect (CME), which has been in the spotlight lately across disciplines of physics. The quark-gluon plasma (QGP) created in relativistic nuclear collisions provides the unique example of a chiral material consisting of intrinsically relativistic chiral fermions. Potential discovery of CME in QGP is of utmost significance, with extensive experimental searches carried out over the past decade. A decisive new collider experiment, dedicated to detecting CME in the collisions of isobars, was performed in 2018 with analysis now underway. In this paper, we develop the state-of-the-art theoretical tool for describing CME phenomenon in these collisions and propose an appropriate isobar subtraction strategy for best background removal. Based on that, we make quantitative predictions for signatures of CME in the collisions of isobars. A new and robust observable that is independent of axial charge uncertainty -- the ratio between isobar-subtracted $γ-$ and $δ-$ correlators, is found to be $- ( 0.41 \pm 0.27 )$ for event-plane measurement and $ - ( 0.90 \pm 0.45 )$ for reaction-plane measurement.