Late-time magnetogenesis driven by ALP dark matter and dark photon [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07269


We propose a mechanism which generates primordial magnetic fields after the $e^+e^-$ annihilations. Our mechanism involves an ultra-light axion-like particle (ALP) which constitutes the dark matter, and a dark $U(1)X$ gauge boson introduced to bypass the obstacle placed by the conductivity of cosmic plasma. In our scheme, coherently oscillating ALP amplifies the dark photon field, and part of the amplified dark photon field is concurrently converted to the ordinary magnetic field through the ALP-induced magnetic mixing. For the relevant ALP mass range $10^{-21} {\rm eV}\lesssim m\phi\lesssim 10^{-17}{\rm eV}$, our mechanism can generate $B\sim 10^{-24} \,(m_\phi/10^{-17} {\rm eV})^{5/4}\,{\rm G}$ with a coherent length $\lambda \sim (m_\phi/10^{-17} {\rm eV})^{-1/2}$ kpc, which is large enough to provide a seed of the galactic magnetic fields. The mechanism also predicts a dark $U(1)X$ electromagnetic field $E_X \sim B_X\sim 10\,(m\phi/10^{-17}{\rm eV})^{-1/4}{\rm nG}$, which can result in interesting astrophysical/cosmological phenomena by inducing the mixings between the ALP, ordinary photon, and dark photon states.

Read this paper on arXiv…

K. Choi, H. Kim and T. Sekiguchi
Thu, 22 Feb 18
13/60

Comments: 6 pages, 2 figures