Generation of large scale magnetic fields in single-field inflation

By Jérôme Martin, J. Yokoyama. 2007

281 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We consider the generation of large scale magnetic fields in slow-roll inflation. The inflaton field is described in a supergravity framework where the conformal invariance of the electromagnetic field is generically and naturally broken. For each class of inflationary scenarios, we determine the functional dependence of the gauge coupling that is consistent with the observations on the magnetic field strength at various astrophysical scales and, at the same time, avoid a back-reaction problem. Then, we study whether the required coupling functions can naturally emerge in well motivated, possibly string inspired, models. We argue that this is non-trivial and can be realized only for a restricted class of scenarios. This includes power-law inflation where the inflaton field is interpreted as a modulus. However, this scenario seems to be consistent only if the energy scale of inflation is low and the reheating stage prolonged. Another reasonable possibility appears to be small field models since no back-reaction problem is present in this case but, unfortunately, the corresponding scenario cannot be justified in a stringy framework. Finally, large field models do not lead to sensible model building.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/79cd935b2dc6f1d74492f9c068b90ca95adaa9ca

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Citations in the corpus

Inflationary magnetogenesis without the strong coupling problem (2013, background): “Some related works considering the effects of the effective reheating parameter are [14, 39].”
Adding helicity to inflationary magnetogenesis (2014, background): “However, it has been demonstrated that the most commonly studied gauge invariant model of magnetogenesis is affected by the backreaction and the strong coupling constraints: the constraints apply right in the region of parameter space for which the model could produce magnetic fields with observatio”
Cosmological Magnetic Fields: Their Generation, Evolution and Observation (2013, methodology): “One may adopt, at least for a short time, a simple power law in conformal time (Martin and Yokoyama 2008):”
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.”
Cosmological magnetic fields from inflation and backreaction (2009, background): “Let us consider more general cases by introducing a parameter c in the following form [5]:”
The best inflationary models after Planck (2013, unknown): “[28–30, 33–37].”