Axial anomaly, Dirac sea, and the chiral magnetic effect

Abstract

Gribov viewed the axial anomaly as a manifestation of the collective motion of charged fermions with arbitrarily high momenta in the vacuum. In the presence of an external magnetic field and a chirality imbalance, this collective motion becomes directly observable in the form of the electric current - this is the chiral magnetic effect (CME). I give an elementary introduction into the physics of CME, and discuss some recent developments.

Comments: 12 pages, to appear in the Proceedings of Gribov-80 Memorial conference, ICTP, Trieste, Italy, May 26-28, 2010