Charge-dependent flow induced by electromagnetic fields in heavy ion collisions

The colliding heavy ions create extremely strong magnetic and electric fields that significantly affect the evolution of the produced quark-gluon plasma (QGP). The knowledge of these fields is essential for establishing the role of topological fluctuations in the QGP through the chiral magnetic effect and related anomaly-induced phenomena. In this talk, we describe our work on the evolution of the QGP in electric and magnetic fields in the framework of hydrodynamics supplemented, in a perturbative fashion, by the dynamical electromagnetism. The evolution of the QGP fluid is described within the iEBE-VISHNU framework. We find that the electromagnetically induced currents result in a a charge-odd directed flow Δν₁ and a charge-odd Δν₃ flow both of which are odd in rapidity. While the predicted magnitude of these charge-odd flows agrees with the data from RHIC and LHC, the sign of the predicted asymmetry between the flows of positive and negative hadrons is opposite to the data.