Abstract:

In a relativistic fluid with vorticity and acceleration, an axial current arises in the third order of gradient expansion. We called this phenomenon the Kinematical Vortical Effect (KVE), since it depends solely on medium vorticity and acceleration. We show that, while existing in the absence of gravitational field, KVE is nevertheless associated with effects in curved space-time, namely with the gravitational chiral quantum anomaly. We derive a general formula relating KVE and gravitational anomaly, and then explicitly test it by calculating transport coefficients directly from microscopic theory for massless fields with spins 1/2 and 3/2. In the latter case, the corresponding cubic transport coefficients were found using the Zubarev quantum-statistical density operator for the recently proposed Rarita-Schwinger-Adler theory. Our result opens up the possibility of searching for a gravitational anomaly in a vortical matter, formed in noncentral heavy ion collisions.

References:

[1] G. Prokhorov, O. Teryaev, and V. Zakharov. Hydrodynamic Manifestations of Gravitational Chiral Anomaly. Phys. Rev. Lett., 129(15):151601, 2022. arXiv:2207.04449 [hep-th]
[2] G. Prokhorov, O. Teryaev, and V. Zakharov. Gravitational chiral anomaly and anomalous transport for fields with spin 3/2, 2022. arXiv:2211.03865 [hep-th]