2000/04/28 by Massimo Giovannini, M. Giovannini, Mikhail Shaposhnikov +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Electroweak interaction #Inflation (cosmology) #Magnetic field #Particle physics #Physics #Quantum electrodynamics #Quantum mechanics #Scalar (mathematics) #Solar and Space Plasma Dynamics #astro-ph #gr-qc #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.62.103512
published as Phys.Rev. D62 (2000) 103512 · 32 pages in RevTex style
arxiv created 2000/04/28 · openalex publication_date 2000/10/13 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The hot plasma above the electroweak scale contains (hyper)charged scalar particles which are coupled to Abelian gauge fields. Scalars may interact with gravity in a nonconformally invariant way and thus their fluctuations can be amplified during inflation. These fluctuations lead to the creation of electric currents and produce an inhomogeneous distribution of charge density, resulting in the generation of cosmological magnetic fields. We address the question of whether these fields can be coherent at large scales so that they may seed the galactic magnetic fields. Depending upon the mass of the charged scalar and upon various cosmological (critical fraction of energy density in matter, Hubble constant) and particle physics parameters we find that the magnetic fields generated in this way are much larger than vacuum fluctuations. However, their amplitude on cosmological distances is found to be too small for seeding the galactic magnetic fields.