Resonant magnetogenesis from axions

TL;DR

This paper explores how axion oscillations during different cosmic epochs can resonantly generate helical magnetic fields with significant amplitude, offering a novel mechanism for primordial magnetogenesis.

Contribution

It introduces a resonant magnetogenesis mechanism driven by axion oscillations during various epochs, capable of producing observable magnetic fields without backreaction issues.

Findings

Resonant generation efficiently produces magnetic fields with O(1) coupling.

Helical magnetic fields are generated via tachyonic amplification.

Reheating parametric resonance yields circularly polarized magnetic fields with current amplitude 3×10^{-15} Gauss.

Abstract

We investigate the generation of seed magnetic field through the Chern-Simons coupling between the U(1) gauge field and an axion field that commences to oscillate at various epoch, depending on the mass scale. We address axions which begin oscillation during inflation, reheating, and also the radiation dominated era after the thermalization of the Universe. We study the resonant generation mechanisms and highlight that a small oscillation time scale with respect to that of the cosmic expansion can lead to an efficient generation of (hyper) magnetic field via resonant generation, even for ${\cal O}(1)$ coupling. In addition, we demonstrate that the generated field can be helical due to the tachyonic amplification phase prior to the onset of oscillation. Furthermore, it is shown that the parametric resonance during reheating can generate a circularly polarized (hyper) magnetic field in a void region with the present amplitude $B_0 =3\times 10^{-15}$Gauss and the coherent length $\lambda_0 = 0.3$pc without being plagued by the backreaction issue.