Probing Primordial Magnetic Fields Using Ly-alpha Clouds

TL;DR

This paper investigates how primordial magnetic fields influence the distribution of Ly-alpha clouds and uses observational data to place upper bounds on the magnetic field strength, enhancing understanding of early universe magnetism.

Contribution

It introduces a simulation of Ly-alpha cloud distribution considering primordial magnetic fields and derives constraints on magnetic field strength from observational data.

Findings

Upper bounds of 0.3-0.6 nG on magnetic field strength.

Primordial magnetic fields induce additional small-scale perturbations.

Constraints depend on the magnetic field power spectrum index.

Abstract

From previous studies of the effect of primordial magnetic fields on early structure formation, we know that the presence of primordial magnetic fields during early structure formation could induce more perturbations at small scales (at present 1-10 Mpc/h) as compared to the usual LCDM theory. Matter power spectrum over these scales are effectively probed by cosmological observables such as shear correlation and Ly-alpha clouds, In this paper we discuss the implications of primordial magnetic fields on the distribution of Ly-alpha clouds. We simulate the line of sight density fluctuation including the contribution coming from the primordial magnetic fields. We compute the evolution of Ly-alpha opacity for this case and compare our theoretical estimates of Ly-alpha opacity with the existing data to constrain the parameters of the primordial magnetic fields. We also discuss the case when the two density fields are correlated. Our analysis yields an upper bounds of roughly 0.3-0.6 nG on the magnetic field strength for a range of nearly scale invariant models, corresponding to magnetic field power spectrum index n \simeq -3.