A Brief Review of Chiral Chemical Potential and Its Physical Effects

Abstract

Nontrivial topological gluon configuration is one of the remarkable features of the Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). Due to chiral anomaly, the chiral imbalance between right- and left-hand quarks can be induced by the transition of the nontrivial gluon configurations between different vacuums. In this review, we will introduce the origin of the chiral chemical potential and its physical effects. These include: (1) the chiral imbalance in the presence of strong magnetic and related physical phenomena; (2) the influence of chiral chemical potential on the QCD phase structure; and (3) the effects of chiral chemical potential on quark stars. Moreover, we propose for the first time that quark stars are likely to be a natural laboratory for testing the destruction of strong interaction CP.