Drag suppression in anomalous chiral media

Abstract

We study a heavy impurity moving longitudinal with the direction of an external magnetic field in an anomalous chiral medium. Such system would carry a nondissipative current of chiral magnetic effect associated with the anomaly. We show, by generalizing Landau’s criterion for superfluidity, that the “anomalous component” which gives rise to the anomalous transport will not contribute to the drag experienced by an impurity. We argue on a very general basis that those systems with a strong magnetic field would exhibit an interesting transport phenomenon—the motion of the heavy impurity is frictionless, in analogy to the case of a superfluid. We demonstrate and confirm our general results with two complementary examples: weakly coupled chiral fermion gases and strongly interacting chiral liquids.