Frequency dependence of the Chiral Vortical Effect

Karl Landsteiner, Eugenio Megias, Francisco Pena-Benitez

Published 2013-12-04, updated 2014-09-18Version 2

We study the frequency dependence of all the chiral vortical and magnetic conductivities for a relativistic gas of free chiral fermions and for a strongly coupled conformal field theory with holographic dual in four dimensions. Both systems have gauge and gravitational anomalies, and we compute their contribution to the conductivities. The chiral vortical conductivities and the chiral magnetic conductivity in the energy current show a frequency dependence in the form of a delta centered at zero frequency. This highly discontinuous behavior is a natural consequence of the Ward identities that include the energy momentum tensor. We discuss the physical interpretation of this result and its possible implications for the quark gluon plasma as created in heavy ion collisions. In the Appendix we discuss why the chiral magnetic effect seems to vanish in the consistent current for a particular implementation of the axial chemical potential.