Chiral magnetic wave and axial charge relaxation in flavor branes

Abstract

We investigate the chiral magnetic wave and axial charge relaxation in the chiral symmetry broken phase of the holographic D3/D7 model with massless quarks, where the axial charge in the flavor sector can relax through transfer to the adjoint sector in the probe limit. We find that the dispersion relations of the quasi-normal modes are well described by the phenomenological expression for the chiral magnetic wave when the relaxation rate is small. We then determine how this rate depends on vector charge density and the chiral condensate. At higher temperatures, it increases with charge density and decreases with increasing condensate, while these dependences become non-monotonic at lower temperatures. These results show that the phenomenological description of the chiral magnetic wave also applies in the chiral symmetry broken phase in the quasi-hydrodynamic regime.