Charge fluctuations from the chiral magnetic effect in nuclear collisions

Abstract

We derive a nonlocal effective Lagrangian for the chiral magnetic effect. An electric field is generated by winding number fluctuations of the nonabelian gauge field in the presence of a strong magnetic field. We estimate the magnitude of charge asymmetry fluctuations with respect to the reaction plane induced by the chiral magnetic effect in relativistic heavy-ion collisions to be less than 10(-6), several orders of magnitude smaller than the signal observed in the STAR experiment.