Hadronic and partonic mechanisms for a reaction plane charge asymmetry

We discuss several mechanisms for the creation of a charge asymmetry with respect to the reaction plane among hadrons emitted in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. We show that such mechanisms exist in both, the hadron gas and the quark-gluon plasma phase. All such mechanisms have in common that they require the presence of a strong magnetic field (the ``chiral magnetic effect''), but they do not involve P or PC symmetry violations. We analyze how a transient local electric current generated by the chiral magnetic effect can dynamically evolve into a charge asymmetry of the final-state hadron distribution in momentum space. We estimate the magnitude of the event-by-event fluctuations of the final-state charge asymmetry due to the partonic and hadronic mechanisms.