Nonequilibrium axial charge production in expanding glasma flux tubes

Abstract

Axial charge production at the early stage of heavy-ion collisions is investigated within the framework of real-time lattice simulations at leading order in QCD coupling. Starting from color glass condensate initial conditions, the time evolution of quantum quark fields under classical color gauge fields is computed on a lattice in longitudinally expanding geometry. We consider simple color charge distributions in Lorentz contracted nuclei that realize flux tube-like configurations of color fields carrying nonzero topological charge after a collision. By employing the Wilson fermion extended to the longitudinally expanding geometry, we demonstrate the realization of the axial anomaly on the real-time lattice.