Speaker: Dmitri Kharzeev, Brookhaven National Laboratory
Abstract: will address the role of chiral symmetry and parity invariance in the properties of hot and dense quark-gluon matter. The possibility of parity-odd effects in this matter will be discussed. Local parity violation can manifest itself in heavy ion collisions at RHIC through the spatial separation of positive and negative particles with respect to the reaction plane. The charge separation induces the electric dipole moment of the produced hot quark-gluon matter; it stems from the interplay of strong magnetic field in the early stage of the heavy ion collision and the presence of topological configurations in hot matter ("the chiral magnetic effect"). There is a recent experimental evidence for local parity violation at RHIC. The effect has interesting implications for the cosmology of the Early Universe, and has analogs in condensed matter physics (quantum wires, graphene, and topological insulators), and in astrophysics (particle acceleration in cosmic strings).