A Holographic Chiral Magnetic Effect

In 3+1 dimensions, a net chirality (an excess of left-handed fermions, for example) in the presence of a magnetic field can give rise to a current parallel to the magnetic field. This is the chiral magnetic effect (CME). In heavy ion collisions such as those at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a quark gluon plasma is created that, under the right circumstances, may experience large magnetic fields and a net chirality, raising the possibility that the CME may occur. Experimental searches are currently underway to detect the CME in heavy-ion collisions. The burden is on theorists to produce a prediction for the magnitude of the CME. Given that the degrees of freedom involved are strongly interacting, theorists have few reliable techniques to calculate the CME. In this talk I will discuss an analysis of the CME using gauge-gravity duality. I will present a specific model, discuss how we compute the CME in that model, and present novel results for the dependence of the CME on the masses of quarks.