Charles Riley

Parity violation of the strong interaction is prohibited globally, however, it may be possible for parity to be violated locally in hot, dense, and deconfined QCD matter created in heavy ion collisions. Microscopic parity-odd domains in QCD are the consequence of topologically non-trivial configurations of gauge fields, and may be observable in heavy ion collisions due to the so called Chiral Magnetic Effect (CME). The CME predicts that provided a strong magnetic field (produced in a non-central collisions) and a P-odd bubble, the resultant hadron distribution should reflect a separation of charge parallel to the system’s orbital angular momentum. In this talk, I present several measurements that identify this charge separation in heavy ion collisions collected using the STAR detector at RHIC. This analysis considers other possible sources that contribute to the measurement, and attempts to differentiate the possible backgrounds that obscure the evidence for local parity violation.