Role of the electron mass in damping chiral plasma instability in Supernovae and neutron stars

Abstract

We show that the nonzero electron mass plays a critical role in determining the magnetic properties of neutron stars, making it impossible to generate the chiral charge density needed to trigger a strong chiral magnetic instability during the core collapse of supernovae. This instability has been proposed as a plausible mechanism for generating extremely large helical magnetic fields in neutron stars at their birth; the mechanism relies on the generation of a large non-equilibrium chiral charge density via electron capture reactions that selectively deplete left-handed electrons during core-collapse and the early evolution of the protoneutron star. Our calculation shows that the electron chirality violation rate induced by Rutherford scattering, despite being suppressed by the smallness of the electron mass relative to the electron chemical potential, is still fast compared to the weak interaction electron capture rate. The resulting asymmetry between right and left-handed electron densities is therefore never able to attain an astrophysically relevant magnitude.

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

“…On average it must vanish θ = 0 to preserve the global CP-invariance of the QCD. Its space and time dynamics is complicated: shortly after a heavy-ion collision it is determined by the colored fields of glasma [30][31][32], while at later time by the sphaleron transition dynamics [20][21][22][23].…”

“…† A different type of "chiral plasma instabilities" has been recently discussed in [18][19][20][21][22][23].…”

Longitudinal conductivity in strong magnetic field in perturbative QCD: Complete leading order

“…From the Feynman rules summarized in the Appendix 1, it is straightforward to get the collision term for the quark distribution f + (p z ) as 17) where E p = p 2 z + m 2 q , E k = |k|, d 2 p ≡ dp z dp 2 , and 18) which includes only spatial two dimensions (p z , p 2 ) (recall that p 2 is the label for the LLL states), while we write down the energy δ-function explicitly. Note that the gluon momentum k is fully three dimensional.…”

“…To have a finite conductivity, we should consider relaxation dynamics of the axial charge: either sphaleron transitions or a finite quark mass [17]. With the relaxation term of − 1 τ R n A in the right-hand side of (1.1), we have a stationary solution n A = e 2 NcN F 2π 2 E · Bτ R , which gives a finite contribution to the longitudinal conductivity from Chiral Magnetic Effect [18],…”

Laminar and Turbulent Dynamos in Chiral Magnetohydrodynamics. I. Theory

“…This effect has first been described by Vilenkin (1980) and rederived later using different arguments (see, e.g., Redlich & Wijewardhana 1985;Tsokos 1985;Alekseev et al 1998;Fröhlich & Pedrini 2000, 2002Fukushima et al 2008;Son & Surowka 2009). This contribution to the electric current causes an instability in the system (Joyce & Shaposhnikov 1997) that has been analyzed in many works (Fröhlich & Pedrini 2000;Ooguri & Oshikawa 2012;Boyarsky et al 2012a;Kumar et al 2014;Grabowska et al 2015;Manuel & Torres-Rincon 2015;Buividovich & Ulybyshev 2016;Boyarsky et al 2015;). This instability may be relevant in the physics of the early universe (Joyce & Shaposhnikov 1997;Fröhlich & Pedrini 2000, 2002Semikoz & Sokoloff 2004;Semikoz et al 2009;Boyarsky et al 2012a,b;Semikoz et al 2012;Tashiro et al 2012;Dvornikov & Semikoz 2012, 2014Manuel & Torres-Rincon 2015;Gorbar et al 2016;Pavlović et al 2016;Pavlović et al 2017), of the quark-gluon plasmas (Akamatsu & Yamamoto 2013;Taghavi & Wiedemann 2015;Hirono et al 2015), or of neutron stars (Ohnishi & Yamamoto 2014;Dvornikov & Semikoz 2015a,b;Yama...…”