Chiral magnetic effect by synthetic gauge fields

Abstract

We study the dynamical generation of the chiral chemical potential in a Weyl metal constructed from a three-dimensional optical lattice and subject to synthetic gauge fields. By numerically solving the Boltzmann equation with the Berry curvature in the presence of parallel synthetic electric and magnetic fields, we find that the spectral flow and the ensuing chiral magnetic current emerge. We show that the spectral flow and the chiral chemical potential can be probed by time-of-flight imaging.