Anomalous transport effects and possible environmental symmetry ‘violation’ in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

The heavy-ion collision provides a unique many-body environment where local domains of strongly interacting chiral medium may occur and in a sense allow environmental symmetry ‘violation’ phenomena. For example, certain anomalous transport processes, forbidden in usual medium, become possible in such domains. We briefly review recent progress in both the theoretical understanding and experimental search of various anomalous transport effects (such as the chiral magnetic effect, chiral separation effect, chiral electric separation effect, chiral electric /magnetic waves, etc.) in the hot QCD fluid formed by such collisions.