Primordial magnetic field from chiral plasma instability with sourcing
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 . 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 . In this work, we propose that the presence of a source for chirality can allow the CPI to operate even below , 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