Importance of Isobar Density Distributions on the Chiral Magnetic Effect Search

Phys Rev Lett. 2018 Jul 13;121(2):022301. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.022301.

Abstract

Under the approximate chiral symmetry restoration, quark interactions with topological gluon fields in quantum chromodynamics can induce a chirality imbalance and parity violation in local domains. An electric charge separation (CS) could be generated along the direction of a strong magnetic field (B), a phenomenon called the chiral magnetic effect (CME). CS measurements by azimuthal correlators are contaminated by major backgrounds from elliptic flow anisotropy (v_{2}). Isobaric _{44}^{96}Ru+_{44}^{96}Ru and _{40}^{96}Zr+_{40}^{96}Zr collisions have been proposed to identify the CME (expected to differ between the two systems) out of the backgrounds (to be almost the same). We show, by using the density functional theory calculations of the proton and neutron distributions, that these expectations may not hold as originally anticipated because the two systems may have sizable differences in eccentricity and v_{2}.