RUI: Probing QCD with a Magnetic Field

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Normal matter is made of atoms consisting of electrons and nuclei, nuclei are made of neutrons and protons, and neutrons and protons are made of up and down quarks. In contrast, the cores of compact stars are so dense that a tiny box containing neutron-star matter would have a mass of about 13 million tons. Neutrons in such a dense medium get so squeezed that the quarks inside them become liberated. Quite often this stellar dense matter will be also subjected to very large magnetic fields. A special class of neutron stars, known as magnetars, can have surface magnetic fields that are fifteen orders of magnitude stronger than the magnetic field of the Sun and even much stronger fields in the core. In this context, an important goal of the nuclear theory community is to understand the phases of matter under extreme conditions in order to make theoretical predictions that can then be compared with observational data and experimental measurements made on Earth. In particular, this project will explore the properties of matter under extreme conditions by studying results from heavy-ion collision experiments carried out at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC). Experiments at RHIC produce matter at temperatures a thousand times hotter than the Sun and magnetic fields eighteen orders of magnitude stronger than the Sun's magnetic field. Graduate and undergraduate students will have ample training opportunities, and the skills acquired in this project will serve them well in their future professional careers.Despite the wealth of information gained in recent years about the properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) formed in heavy-ion collision experiments, much still remains to be discovered. For example, it is known that the QGP formed in these collisions is a perfect liquid, but the state of matter that replaces the "liquid" QGP at higher densities and lower temperatures is yet to be understood. This project will investigate some of these problems. The PI and his collaborators will use nonperturbative methods in quantum field theory to investigate the influence of a magnetic field on the transport properties of quark matter at high temperatures and low densities (in the QGP phase); and at high densities and low temperatures, where the spatially inhomogeneous phase known as the Dual Chiral Density Wave phase and axion electrodynamics are realized. To carry out this project, the PI will formulate the kinematics of relativistic plasmas with anomalous transport associated with a Berry curvature produced by quark quasiparticles with asymmetric spectra. In addition, the PI will extend recent work on inverse magnetic catalysis in the weak-coupling limit to the strong-coupling regime case to complete the analogy between analytical calculations beyond the mean-field approximation and lattice QCD results. These studies will give new insights on probing the microscopic physics of high dense quark matter through macroscopically observable signatures. These studies will help establish connections between nuclear physics, condensed matter, and astrophysics.