Search for the chiral magnetic effect with the ALICE experiment

Relativistic heavy-ion collisions create a hot and dense medium of quarks and gluons named Quark–Gluon Plasma (QGP). The nonzero axial chemical potential in this QGP, induced by the chiral anomaly with an imbalance of left-and right-handed quarks, can produce an electric current along the magnetic field ~ B created by the spectator protons. This current manifests itself as a charge separation along the direction of ~ B. This phenomenon is known as the chiral magnetic effect (CME) [1]. To measure the CME in heavy-ion collisions, angular correlations of charged particle are used. One such observable is a three–particle correlator given by