Electromagnetic field and the chiral magnetic effect in the quark-gluon plasma

Abstract

Time evolution of an electromagnetic field created in heavy-ion collisions strongly depends on the electromagnetic response of the quark-gluon plasma, which can be described by the Ohmic and chiral conductivities. The latter is intimately related to the chiral magnetic effect. I argue that a solution to the classical Maxwell equations at finite chiral conductivity is unstable due to the soft modes k