Primordial magnetogenesis

By A. Kandus, K. Kunze, Christos G. Tsagas. 2010

305 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Magnetic fields appear everywhere in the universe. From stars and galaxies, all the way to galaxy clusters and remote protogalactic clouds, magnetic fields of considerable strength and size have been repeatedly observed. Despite their widespread presence, however, the origin of cosmic magnetic fields is still a mystery. The galactic dynamo is believed capable of amplifying weak magnetic seeds to strengths like those measured in ours and other galaxies. But the question is where do these seed fields come from? Are they a product of late, post-recombination, physics or are they truly cosmological in origin? The idea of primordial magnetism is attractive because it makes the large-scale magnetic fields, especially those found in early protogalactic systems, easier to explain. As a result, a host of different scenarios have appeared in the literature. Nevertheless, early magnetogenesis is not problem free, with a number of issues remaining open and matter of debate. We review the question of the origin of primordial magnetic fields and consider the limits set on their strength by the current observational data. The various mechanisms of pre-recombination magnetogenesis are presented and their advantages and shortcomings are debated. We consider both classical and quantum scenarios, that operate within as well as outside the standard model, and also discuss how future observations could be used to decide whether the large-scale magnetic fields we see in the universe today are truly primordial or not.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4d9040b302c42068e81728e27964c8ab384ec5c6

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Citations in the corpus

Gauge fields and inflation (2012, background): “There are many works on primordial magnetic fields from inflation [55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63], although there exists no convincing model so far.”
Magnetogenesis from axion inflation (2016, background): “Many attempts have been made to propose a primordial origin of large-scale magnetic fields (see for example [16]).”
ROLE OF LINE-OF-SIGHT COSMIC-RAY INTERACTIONS IN FORMING THE SPECTRA OF DISTANT BLAZARS IN TeV GAMMA RAYS AND HIGH-ENERGY NEUTRINOS (2010, background): “In intergalactic space, the magnetic fields are much weaker than inside a galaxy, and can have the field strengths as low as a femtogauss (Ando & Kusenko 2010; Kandus et al. 2010).”
Cosmological Magnetic Fields: Their Generation, Evolution and Observation (2013, background): “These possibilities have first been investigated by Turner and Widrow (1988) and by Ratra (1992) and later been revisited by many authors (Martin and Yokoyama 2008; Subramanian 2010; Kunze 2010; Kandus et al 2011; Motta and Caldwell 2012; Jain and Sloth 2012) to cite a few recent accounts.”