2016/07/16 by Wei-Tian Deng, Xu-Guang Huang, Guo-Liang Ma +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #hep-ph #nucl-ex #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevc.94.041901
published as Phys. Rev. C 94, 041901 (2016) · V1: 4 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2016/07/16 · arxiv updated 2016/11/02
The quark-gluon matter produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions may contain local domains in which P and CP symmetries are not preserved. When coupled with an external magnetic field, such P- and CP-odd domains will generate electric currents along the magnetic field --- a phenomenon called the chiral magnetic effect (CME). Recently, the STAR Collaboration at RHIC and the ALICE Collaboration at the LHC released data of charge-dependent azimuthal-angle correlators with features consistent with the CME expectation. However, the experimental observable is contaminated with significant background contributions from elliptic-flow-driven effects, which makes the interpretation of the data ambiguous. In this Letter, we show that the collisions of isobaric nuclei, 9644Ru + 9644Ru and 9640Zr + 9640Zr, provide an ideal tool to disentangle the CME signal from the background effects. Our simulation demonstrates that the two collision types at √s\rm NN=200 GeV have more than 10% difference in the CME signal and less than 2% difference in the elliptic-flow-driven backgrounds for the centrality range of 20-60%.