Axial chiral vortical effect in a sphere with finite size effect*

Abstract

Abstract We investigate the axial vortical effect in a uniformly rotating sphere subject to finite size. We use the MIT boundary condition to limit the boundary of the sphere. For massless fermions inside the sphere, we obtain the exact axial vector current far from the boundary that matches the expression obtained in cylindrical coordinates in literature. On the spherical boundary, we find both the longitudinal and transverse (with respect to the rotation axis) components with magnitude depending on the colatitude angle. For massive fermions, we derive an expansion of the axial conductivity far from the boundary to all orders of mass, whose leading order term agrees with the mass correction reported in literature. We also obtain the leading order mass correction on the boundary, which is linear and stronger than the quadratic dependence far from the boundary. The qualitative implications on the phenomenology of heavy ion collisions are speculated.