English

Primordial magnetic field from chiral plasma instability with sourcing

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2025-12-11 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

In an electron-positron plasma, an imbalance in the number of right- and left-chiral particles can lead to the growth of a helical magnetic field through a phenomenon called the chiral plasma instability (CPI). In the early universe, scattering reactions that violate chirality come into thermal equilibrium when the plasma cools below a temperature of approximately 80TeV80 \, \mathrm{TeV}. Since these reactions tend to relax any pre-existing chiral asymmetry to zero as the system approaches equilibrium, the standard lore is that primordial magnetogenesis via the CPI is not viable below 80TeV80 \, \mathrm{TeV}. In this work, we propose that the presence of a source for chirality can allow the CPI to operate even below 80TeV80 \, \mathrm{TeV}, we explore the implications of this scenario, and we derive predictions for the resultant magnetic field helicity using a combination of analytical methods and direct numerical simulation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.09177,
  title  = {Primordial magnetic field from chiral plasma instability with sourcing},
  author = {Murman Gurgenidze and Andrew J. Long and Alberto Roper Pol and Axel Brandenburg and Tina Kahniashvili},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.09177},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

11 + 2 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables