Upper Limit on the Chiral Magnetic Effect in Isobar Collisions at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider

Abstract

The chiral magnetic effect (CME) is a phenomenon that arises from the QCD anomaly in the presence of an external magnetic field. The experimental search for its evidence has been one of the key goals of the physics program of the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider. The STAR collaboration has previously presented the results of a blind analysis of isobar collisions (${}_{44}^{96}\text{Ru}+{}_{44}^{96}\text{Ru}$, ${}_{40}^{96}\text{Zr}+{}_{40}^{96}\text{Zr}$) in the search for the CME. The isobar ratio ($Y$) of CME-sensitive observable, charge separation scaled by elliptic anisotropy, is close to but systematically larger than the inverse multiplicity ratio, the naive background baseline. This indicates the potential existence of a CME signal and the presence of remaining nonflow background due to two- and three-particle correlations, which are different between the isobars. In this post-blind analysis, we estimate the contributions from those nonflow correlations as a background baseline to $Y$, utilizing the isobar data as well as Heavy Ion Jet Interaction Generator simulations. This baseline is found consistent with the isobar ratio measurement, and an upper limit of 10% at 95% confidence level is extracted for the CME fraction in the charge separation measurement in isobar collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=200$ GeV.

8 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (10)

• The Chiral Magnetic Effect
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• Impact of globally spin-aligned vector mesons on the search for the chiral magnetic effect in heavy-ion collisions
• Estimate of Background Baseline and Upper Limit on the Chiral Magnetic Effect in Isobar Collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\text{NN}}}=200$ GeV at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Estimate of Background Baseline and Upper Limit on the Chiral Magnetic Effect in Isobar Collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\text{NN}}}=200$ GeV at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider
• Review of nonflow estimation methods and uncertainties in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Experimental review on the chiral magnetic effect in relativistic heavy ion collisions
• Search for the chiral magnetic effect through beam energy dependence of charge separation using event shape selection
• Collective effects in strong interaction processes: experimental highlights