Looking for Cosmological Alfven Waves in WMAP Data
Astrophysics
2008-11-26 v2
Abstract
A primordial cosmological magnetic field induces and supports vorticity or Alfven waves, which in turn generate cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies. A homogeneous primordial magnetic field with fixed direction induces correlations between the and multipole coefficients of the CMB temperature anisotropy field. We discuss the constraints that can be placed on the strength of such a primordial magnetic field using CMB anisotropy data from the WMAP experiment. We place 3 upper limits on the strength of the magnetic field of nG for vector perturbation spectral index and nG for .
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0403695,
title = {Looking for Cosmological Alfven Waves in WMAP Data},
author = {Gang Chen and Pia Mukherjee and Tina Kahniashvili and Bharat Ratra and Yun Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0403695},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
14 pages, 3 figures, minor changes, references added, ApJ, in press