Dynamics of vortices in chiral media: the chiral propulsion effect

Abstract: We study the motion of vortex filaments in chiral media, and find a semi-classical analog of the anomaly-induced chiral magnetic effect. The helical solitonic excitations on vortices in a parity-breaking medium are found to carry an additional energy flow along the vortex in the direction dictated by the sign of chirality imbalance; we call this new transport phenomenon the Chiral Propulsion Effect (CPE). The dynamics of the filament is described by a modified version of the localized induction equation in the parity-breaking background. We analyze the linear stability of simple vortex configurations, and study the effects of chiral media on the excitation spectrum and the growth rate of the unstable modes. It is also shown that, if the equation of motion of the filament is symmetric under the simultaneous reversal of parity and time, the resulting planar solution cannot transport energy.