Probing Chiral Magnetic Wave phenomena in Pb–Pb collisions with ALICE at the LHC

Abstract

Abstract The interplay of the chiral anomaly and the strong magnetic field ( ∼1015 T) created in non central heavy-ion collisions could give rise to a collective excitation in the quark-gluon plasma called the Chiral Magnetic Wave (CMW), which can be experimentally sought through the charge asymmetry (A ch) dependence of the elliptic flow v 2 of positively and negatively charged hadrons. However, non-CMW mechanisms such as local charge conservation (LCC) interwined with collective flow can also lead to a similar dependence of v 2 on A ch. The measurement of triangular flow (v 3) thus serves as a reference as it is not expected to be affected by the CMW. In this study the slope parameters of Δv 2 vs A ch and Δv 3 vs A ch are estimated and compared with each other and with theoretical models to probe the CMW background.