Transition Radiation as a Probe of the Chiral Anomaly

Open Access

Transition Radiation as a Probe of the Chiral Anomaly

Xu-Guang Huang and Kirill Tuchin

Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 182301 – Published 2 November 2018

Abstract

A fast charged particle crossing the boundary between chiral matter and vacuum radiates transition radiation. Its most remarkable features—the resonant behavior at a certain emission angle and the circular polarization of the spectrum—depend on the parameters of the chiral anomaly in a particular material or matter. Chiral transition radiation can be used to investigate the chiral anomaly in such diverse media as the quark-gluon plasma, Weyl semimetals, and axionic dark matter.

Received 5 August 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.182301

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP³.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Anomalies Axions Quantum electrodynamics Quark-gluon plasma

Weyl semimetal

Particles & FieldsNuclear PhysicsGravitation, Cosmology & AstrophysicsCondensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Xu-Guang Huang^1,2 and Kirill Tuchin³

¹Physics Department and Center for Particle Physics and Field Theory, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
²Key Laboratory of Nuclear Physics and Ion-beam Application (MOE), Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
³Department of Physics and Astronomy, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011, USA