PaperPanorama

Nuclear Theory·nucl-th

Thursday·May 28, 2015

7 papers5 primary·2 cross-listed

  1. 06

    The decay widths, the decay constants, and the branching fractions of a resonant state

    Rafael de la Madrid🇺🇸

    We introduce the differential and the total decay widths of a resonant (Gamow) state decaying into a continuum of stable states. When the resonance has several decay modes, we introduce the corresponding partial decay widths and branching fractions. In the approximation that the resonance is sharp, the expressions for the differential, partial and total decay widths of a resonant state bear a close resemblance with the Golden Rule. In such approximation, the branching fractions of a resonant state are the same as the standard branching fractions obtained by way of the Golden Rule. We also introduce dimensionless decay constants along with their associated differential decay constants, and we express experimentally measurable quantities such as the branching fractions and the energy distributions of decay events in terms of those dimensionless decay constants.

    quant-phhep-phnucl-thNPA(2015)·11 citations
  2. 07

    Chiral drag force

    Krishna Rajagopal🇺🇸 · Andrey V. Sadofyev🇺🇸

    We provide a holographic evaluation of novel contributions to the drag force acting on a heavy quark moving through strongly interacting plasma. The new contributions are chiral in that they act in opposite directions in plasmas containing an excess of left- or right-handed quarks and in that they are proportional to the coefficient of the axial anomaly. These new contributions to the drag force act either parallel to or antiparallel to an external magnetic field or to the vorticity of the fluid plasma. In all these respects, these contributions to the drag force felt by a heavy quark are analogous to the chiral magnetic effect on light quarks. However, the new contribution to the drag force is independent of the electric charge of the heavy quark and is the same for heavy quarks and antiquarks. We show that although the chiral drag force can be non-vanishing for heavy quarks that are at rest in the local fluid rest frame, it does vanish for heavy quarks that are at rest in a suitably chosen frame. In this frame, the heavy quark at rest sees counterpropagating momentum and charge currents, both proportional to the axial anomaly coefficient, but feels no drag force. This provides strong concrete evidence for the absence of dissipation in chiral transport, something that has been predicted previously via consideration of symmetries. Along the way to our principal results, we provide a general calculation of the corrections to the drag force due to the presence of gradients in the flowing fluid in the presence of a nonzero chemical potential. We close with a consequence of our result that is at least in principle observable in heavy ion collisions, namely an anticorrelation between the direction of the CME current for light quarks in a given event and the direction of the kick given to the momentum of all the heavy quarks and antiquarks in that event.

    hep-thhep-phnucl-thJHEP(2015)·71 citations

Affiliations

first authorsco-authorsvia INSPIRE