General thermodynamic equilibrium with axial chemical potential for the free Dirac field

Abstract

We calculate the constitutive equations of the stress-energy tensor and the currents of the free massless Dirac field at thermodynamic equilibrium with acceleration and rotation and a conserved axial charge by using the density operator approach. We carry out an expansion in thermal vorticity to the second order with finite axial chemical potential ${\mu }_A$. The obtained coefficients of the expansion are expressed as correlators of angular momenta and boost operators with the currents. We confirm previous observations that the axial chemical potential induces non-vanishing components of the stress-energy tensor at first order in thermal vorticity due to breaking of parity invariance of the density operator with ${\mu }_A\ne 0$. The appearance of these components might play an important role in chiral hydrodynamics.

Comments: 29 pages, final version published in JHEP, typos