Teerthal Patel

Vanderbilt University, February 7, 12:00 pm

Primordial magnetogenesis from electroweak symmetry breaking

Magnetic fields are ubiquitous in the Universe, present across all scales and epochs. However, the origin of cosmological-scale fields—whether astrophysical or primordial—remains an open question. I will provide a brief overview of the observational constraints, evolution mechanism and possible origins of cosmological magnetic fields. In particular, observations suggest a lower bound of ~10−16 Gauss on large scales, supporting a primordial origin. Primordial magnetic fields can significantly impact cosmic recombination and structure formation and provide crucial insights into the high energy physics. In this talk, I focus on the epoch of electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB) as a potential origin. Specifically, we examine the structure and dynamics of magnetic monopole-antimonopole pairs that arise within electroweak theory. We resolved the field configuration of static electroweak dumbbells using “constrained numerical relaxation” and simulated their annihilation, studying their lifetimes and magnetic relics. The topology of electroweak theory gives rise to monopole pairs confined by strings, whose distribution we determined through an extension of the Kibble mechanism. These monopole-antimonopole pairs undergo annihilation, leaving behind cosmological relic magnetic fields during the EWSB epoch in the early Universe. Our ongoing EWSB simulations study the generation of primordial magnetic fields and their potential impact on present-day cosmological magnetic properties.