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Large-Scale Primordial Magnetic Fields from Inflation and Preheating

Ola Tornkvist·Anne-Christine Davis·Konstantinos Dimopoulos·Tomislav Prokopec
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Abstract

We consider models in which the (transverse) photon mass is non-zero during inflation and drops to zero non-adiabatically at the end of inflation. Through this process, vacuum fluctuations of the photon field are converted into physical, long-wavelength modes with high amplitude. The resulting spectrum of the field strength is approximately B_l ~ 1/l, where l is the relevant coherence scale. With a reasonable model of field evolution we obtain, on comoving galactic scales, a magnetic field strong enough to seed a dynamo mechanism and generate the observed galactic magnetic fields.

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Ola Tornkvist, Anne-Christine Davis, Konstantinos Dimopoulos, Tomislav Prokopec. 2000-11-14. Large-Scale Primordial Magnetic Fields from Inflation and Preheating. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1363559

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