Anomalous chiral transports and spin polarization in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

The relativistic heavy-ion collisions create hot quark-gluon plasma as well as very strong electromagnetic and fluid vortical fields. The strong electromagnetic field and vorticity can induce intriguing macroscopic quantum phenomena such as chiral magnetic effect, chiral separation effect, chiral electric separation effect, chiral vortical effects, and spin polarization of hadrons. These phenomena provide us the experimentally feasible means to study the nontrivial topological sector of the quantum chromodynamics, the possible parity violation of strong interaction at high temperature, and the subatomic spintronics of quark-gluon plasma. These studies, both in theory and in experiment of heavy-ion collisions, are strongly entangled with other subfields of physics, such as condensed matter physics, astrophysics, and cold atomic physics, and thus form an emerging interdisciplinary research area. We will give an introduction to the above phenomena induced by electromagnetic field and vorticity and an overview about the current status of their experimental search in heavy-ion collisions. We also briefly discuss the spin hydrodynamics and the chiral and spin kinetic theories.