Testing the chiral magnetic effect with central U+U collisions.

A quark interaction with topologically nontrivial gluonic fields, instantons and sphalerons, violates P and CP symmetry. In the strong magnetic field of a noncentral nuclear collision such interactions lead to the charge separation along the magnetic field, the so-called chiral magnetic effect (CME). Recent results from the STAR collaboration on charge dependent correlations are consistent with theoretical expectations for CME but may have contributions from other effects, which prevents definitive interpretation of the data. Here I propose to use central body-body U+U collisions to disentangle correlations due to CME from possible background correlations due to elliptic flow. Further, more quantitative studies can be performed with collision of isobaric beams.

Elliptic flow at large transverse momenta from quark coalescence.

We show that hadronization via quark coalescence enhances hadron elliptic flow at large p(perpendicular) relative to that of partons at the same transverse momentum. Therefore, compared to earlier results based on covariant parton transport theory, more moderate initial parton densities dN/deta(b=0) approximately 1500-3000 can explain the differential elliptic flow v(2)(p(perpendicular)) data for Au+Au reactions at sqrt[s]=130 and 200A GeV from BNL RHIC. In addition, v(2)(p(perpendicular)) could saturate at about 50% higher values for baryons than for mesons. If strange quarks have weaker flow than light quarks, hadron v(2) at high p(perpendicular) decreases with relative strangeness content.