Damping rate of a fermion in ultradegenerate chiral matter

Abstract

We compute the damping rate of a fermion propagating in a chiral plasma when there is an imbalance between the densities of left- and right-handed fermions, after generalizing the hard thermal loop resummation techniques for these systems. In the ultradegenerate limit, for very high energies the damping rate of this external fermion approaches a constant value. Closer to the two Fermi surfaces, however, we find that the rate depends on both the energy and the chirality of the fermion, being higher for the predominant chirality. This comes out as a result of its scattering with the particles of the plasma, mediated by the exchange of Landau damped photons. In particular, we find that the chiral imbalance is responsible for a different propagation of the left and right circular polarised transverse modes of the photon, and that a chiral fermion interacts differently with these two transverse modes. We argue that spontaneous radiation of energetic fermions is kinematically forbidden, and discuss the time regime where our computation is valid.

v2: extended version with more detailed analysis on dispersion relations and revised discussion on chiral plasma instability. Title modified. Version accepted for publication. v3: added missing piece in Eqs. (23)-(24), results and conclusions unchanged. 14 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• The Chiral Magnetic Effect
• Chiral transport equation from the quantum Dirac Hamiltonian and the on-shell effective field theory
• Anomalous transport properties of Dirac and Weyl semimetals
• Radiative instability of quantum electrodynamics in chiral matter

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