Chiral magnetic superconductivity

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York 11794-3800, USA
² Department of Physics, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973, USA
³ RIKEN-BNL Research Center, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973-5000, USA

^a e-mail: dmitri.kharzeev@stonybrook.edu

Published online: 22 March 2017

Abstract

Materials with charged chiral quasiparticles in external parallel electric and magnetic fields can support an electric current that grows linearly in time, corresponding to diverging DC conductivity. From experimental viewpoint, this “Chiral Magnetic Superconductivity” (CMS) is thus analogous to conventional superconductivity. However the underlying physics is entirely different – the CMS does not require a condensate of Cooper pairs breaking the gauge degeneracy, and is thus not accompanied by Meissner effect. Instead, it owes its existence to the (temperature-independent) quantum chiral anomaly and the conservation of chirality. As a result, this phenomenon can be expected to survive to much higher temperatures. Even though the chirality of quasiparticles is not strictly conserved in real materials, the chiral magnetic superconductivity should still exhibit itself in AC measurements at frequencies larger than the chirality-flipping rate, and in microstructures of Dirac and Weyl semimetals with thickness below the mean chirality-flipping length that is about 1 – 100 μm. In nuclear physics, the CMS should contribute to the charge-dependent elliptic flow in heavy ion collisions.