Chiral vortical wave and induced flavor charge transport in a rotating quark-gluon plasma

We show the existence of a new gapless collective excitation in a rotating fluid system with chiral fermions, named the chiral vortical wave (CVW). The CVW has its microscopic origin at the quantum anomaly and macroscopically arises from interplay between vector and axial charge fluctuations induced by vortical effects. The wave equation is obtained both from hydrodynamic current equations and from chiral kinetic theory, and its solutions show nontrivial CVW-induced charge transport from different initial conditions. Using the rotating quark-gluon plasma in heavy ion collisions as a concrete example, we show the formation of an induced flavor quadrupole in quark-gluon plasma and estimate the elliptic flow splitting effect for $\mathrm{\Lambda }$ baryons that may be experimentally measured.

Figure 1

CVW-induced flavor charge density profile.

Figure 2

Normalized $\overline{\mathrm{\Lambda }}$ and $\mathrm{\Lambda }$ elliptic flow splitting, $[v_2^{\overline{\mathrm{\Lambda }}}-v_2^{\mathrm{\Lambda }}]/[|q_{\mathrm{\Omega }}^f|A_{\pm }^{\mathrm{\Lambda }}]$, for symmetric two-flavor (2-F) and three-flavor (3-F) cases. The midcentral and the peripheral correspond to for 15%–30% and 60%–92% centrality classes (see Ref. [60]).