Primordial Magnetogenesis and Gravitational Waves from ALP-assisted Phase Transition

TL;DR

This paper explores how a first-order phase transition involving axion-like particles in the early universe could generate both primordial magnetic fields and gravitational waves, linking cosmological signals with particle physics.

Contribution

It presents a minimal ALP model that simultaneously explains primordial magnetic fields and gravitational wave backgrounds, connecting cosmological observations with laboratory searches.

Findings

Maximally helical magnetic fields up to 10^{-9} G are consistent with observations.

ALP parameters that fit gamma-ray data also predict detectable gravitational waves.

The model constrains ALP mass to be greater than 0.1 GeV, accessible to future experiments.

Abstract

Sufficiently strong first-order phase transitions (FOPTs) in the early Universe can simultaneously produce an observable stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) and a large-scale primordial magnetic field (PMF). The recent $3.8\sigma$ evidence for a non-zero intergalactic MF from anisotropic pair-halo searches using \textit{Fermi}-LAT data further motivates a cosmological origin of this MF. We investigate an FOPT-origin of both cosmic signatures, namely, PMF and SGWB, and the correlation between them, within a minimal axion-like particle (ALP) framework in which a global $U(1)$ symmetry is spontaneously broken through radiative corrections, with the ALP sector coupled to the Standard Model (SM) via Higgs-portal. We compute the present-day PMF amplitude and coherence length for both maximally helical and non-helical configurations, accounting for inverse cascade effects. For maximally helical configurations, we find peak field strengths up to $B_0 \sim 10^{-9}$ G at coherence length $\lambda_0 \sim 10^{-3}-10^{-1}$ Mpc, consistent with lower bounds on the IGMF inferred from blazar observations by MAGIC, H.E.S.S. and {\it Fermi}-LAT. We show that the ALP parameter region consistent with $\gamma$-ray blazar data (assuming maximal helicity) simultaneously produces SGWB detectable at future space-based interferometers, such as LISA, etc., over the ALP decay constant range $10^3~\text{GeV} \lesssim f_a \lesssim 10^5~\text{GeV}$. We directly map these onto effective ALP couplings to SM particles, e.g., photons, gluons, and fermions. This establishes a multi-messenger complementarity between cosmological observables and laboratory/astrophysical ALP searches, with the combined constraints preferring relatively heavy ALPs, $m_a \gtrsim 0.1~\text{GeV}$, in a regime accessible to next-generation intensity and energy-frontier experiments.