English

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 al1,ma_{l-1,m} and al+1,ma_{l+1,m} 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 σ\sigma upper limits on the strength of the magnetic field of B<15B < 15 nG for vector perturbation spectral index n=5n=-5 and B<1.7B<1.7 nG for n=7n=-7.

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