Abstract
We compute the collisional energy loss of an {energetic} massive fermion crossing a chiral plasma at finite temperature characterized by an imbalance between the populations of left-handed and right-handed fermions. We find a new contribution to the energy loss which is proportional to the helicity of the test fermion and depends on the amount of chiral imbalance in the plasma. We then compute the difference between the energy loss of a fermion with the two opposite helicities, to assess whether this could be used to quantify the chiral imbalance in the plasma. We find that the leading contribution to these helicity-dependent energy loss contributions comes from the exchange of hard photons (or gluons for QCD) with the medium constituents, and in some scenarios can become comparable to the leading-order result for a plasma without any chiral imbalance. We also evaluate the contribution arising from soft photon exchange, which is a subleading effect, and requires regularization. We illustrate how dimensional regularization is a well suited prescription to be applied to these energy loss computations.
Highlights
The measurement of the energy loss for a jet propagating through a high-temperature plasma is one of the most prominent quantities which can be used to characterize the properties of matter in scenarios such as heavy-ion collision experiments
We have computed the collisional energy loss of an energetic massive fermion crossing a chiral plasma with an imbalance of its left-handed and right-handed populations
In the presence of a chiral imbalance, the energetic fermion interacts differently with the left-handed and right-handed components of the plasma, generating new contributions to the energy loss. These contributions depend on the helicity of the fermion, and we isolated them by focusing on the difference between the energy loss of the two opposite helicities
Summary
The measurement of the energy loss for a jet propagating through a high-temperature plasma is one of the most prominent quantities which can be used to characterize the properties of matter in scenarios such as heavy-ion collision experiments (see e.g., [1,2,3,4] for recent reviews). It has been proposed that the quark-gluon plasma created in a heavy-ion collision could exhibit an imbalance between populations of left-handed and righthanded fermions, giving rise to several new macroscopic phenomena (see [5,6,7] for reviews) Aside from such anomalous transport phenomena, the presence of a chiral imbalanced system should affect the interaction of an energetic fermion with the medium, and in particular its collisional energy loss due to interaction with the constituents of the plasma. Fermion in an imbalanced dense system at zero temperature [8], where it was found that the interaction with the medium particles mediated by soft photons distinguishes between different photon circular polarizations and depends on the chirality of the test particle This in turn suggests to us that a closer investigation of the energy loss might even help shed some light on the amount of chiral imbalance originated in a heavy-ion collision experiment. Tr1⁄2Pðλ;pÞð=P þ MÞγμð=K þ MÞγν 1⁄4 2f1⁄2PμKν þ PνKμ þ ðM2 − P · KÞgμν − iλpi1⁄2Kβðpiε0μβν − p0εiμβνÞ þ M2ε0iμνg; ð4Þ
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