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An X class solar flare has the potential to remove our satellites from orbit, permanently deactivate our main forms of communication and bring humanity into a technology-free age. By using Geant4, it is possible to simulate several layers of the Earth's atmosphere and send a simulated solar flare and coronal mass ejection. This thesis will show the interaction of photons and protons of various energies with several kilometers of atmosphere.
in particle physics, where it explains the origin of pion and hadron mass hierarchy
among other things.
Despite its microscopic origin chirality may also lead to observable effects
in macroscopic physical systems -- relativistic plasmas made of chiral
(spin-$\frac{1}{2}$) particles.
Such plasmas are called \textit{chiral}.
The effects include non-dissipative currents in external fields that could be present
even in quasi-equilibrium, such as the chiral magnetic (CME) and separation (CSE)
effects, as well as a number of inherently chiral collective modes
called the chiral magnetic (CMW) and vortical (CVW) waves.
Applications of chiral plasmas are truly interdisciplinary, ranging from
hot plasma filling the early Universe, to dense matter in neutron stars,
to electronic band structures in Dirac and Weyl semimetals, to quark-gluon plasma
produced in heavy-ion collisions.
The main focus of this dissertation is a search for traces of chiral physics
in the spectrum of collective modes in chiral plasmas.
I start from relativistic chiral kinetic theory and derive
first- and second-order chiral hydrodynamics.
Then I establish key features of an equilibrium state that describes many
physical chiral systems and use it to find the full spectrum of collective modes
in high-temperature and high-density cases.
Finally, I consider in detail the fate of the two inherently chiral waves, namely
the CMW and the CVW, and determine their detection prospects.
The main results of this dissertation are the formulation of a fully covariant
dissipative chiral hydrodynamics and the calculation of the spectrum of collective
modes in chiral plasmas.
It is found that the dissipative effects and dynamical electromagnetism play
an important role in most cases.
In particular, it is found that both the CMW and the CVW are heavily damped by the usual
Ohmic dissipation in charged plasmas and the diffusion effects in neutral plasmas.
These findings prompt a search for new physical observables in heavy-ion collisions,
as well as a revision of potential applications of chiral theories in
cosmology and solid-state physics.
tation to study the effect of screening on the properties of the graphene quantum Hall states with integer filling factors. The analysis is performed in the low-energy Dirac model in the mean-field approximation, in which the long-range Coulomb in- teraction is modified by the one-loop static screening effects. The solutions demon- strate that static screening leads to a substantial suppression of the gap parameters in the quantum Hall states with a broken U (4) flavor symmetry. The results of the temperature dependence of the energy gaps mimic well the temperature dependence of the activation energies measured in experiment. The Landau-level running of the quasiparticle dynamical parameters could be tested via optical studies of the integer quantum Hall states.
In the second part, by using the generalized Landau-level representation, we study the interaction induced chiral asymmetry in cold QED plasma beyond the weak-field approximation. The chiral shift and the parity-even chiral chemical potential function are obtained numerically and are found peaking near the Fermi surface and increases and decreases with the Landau level index, respectively. The results are used to quantify the chiral asymmetry of the Fermi surface in dense QED matter. The chiral asymmetry appears to be rather small even in the strongest mag- netic fields and at the highest stellar densities. However, the analogous asymmetry can be substantial in the case of dense quark matter.
The interaction induced chiral asymmetry is calculated in cold QED plasma beyond the weak-field approximation. By making use of the recently developed Landau-level representation for the fermion self-energy, the chiral shift and the parity-even chiral chemical potential function are obtained with the help of numerical methods. The results are used to quantify the chiral asymmetry of the Fermi surface in dense QED matter. Because of the weakness of the QED interactions, the value of the asymmetry appears to be rather small even in the strongest magnetic fields and at the highest stellar densities. However, the analogous asymmetry can be substantial in the case of dense quark matter.