To B or not to B: primordial magnetic fields from Weyl anomaly

DOI10.1007/JHEP11(2018)039MaRDI QIDQ1635142zbMATH OpenWikidataFDO

Authors André Benevides, Atish Dabholkar, Takeshi Kobayashi

Publication date 18 December 2018

Published in Journal of High Energy Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.08237

zbMATH Keywords

anomalies in field and string theorieseffective field theoriesmodels of quantum gravity

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Anomalies in quantum field theory (81T50) Electromagnetic interaction; quantum electrodynamics (81V10) Einstein-Maxwell equations (83C22) Quantization of the gravitational field (83C45) String and superstring theories in gravitational theory (83E30) Astrophysical cosmology (85A40)

Abstract: The quantum effective action for the electromagnetic field in an expanding universe has an anomalous dependence on the scale factor of the metric arising from virtual charged particles in the loops. It has been argued that this Weyl anomaly of quantum electrodynamics sources cosmological magnetic fields in the early universe. We examine this long-standing claim by using the effective action beyond the weak gravitational field limit which has recently been determined. We introduce a general criteria for assessing the quantumness of field fluctuations, and show that the Weyl anomaly is not able to convert vacuum fluctuations of the gauge field into classical fluctuations. We conclude that there is no production of coherent magnetic fields in the universe from the Weyl anomaly of quantum electrodynamics, irrespective of the number of massless charged particles in the theory.

Recommendations

• Magnetic fields and the Weyl tensor in the early universe
• Cosmic magnetization out from the vacuum
• Primordial magnetic fields and gravitational waves
• EFFECTS OF PRIMORDIAL MAGNETIC FIELD ON EARLY UNIVERSE
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 6436167

Cites work

• A model with cosmological Bell inequalities
• A nonlocal action for the trace anomaly
• A quartic conformally covariant differential operator for arbitrary pseudo-Riemannian manifolds (Summary)
• Conformal invariance and asymptotic freedom in quantum gravity
• Covariant non-local action for massless QED and the curvature expansion
• Nonlocal quantum effective actions in Weyl-flat spacetimes
• The basis of nonlocal curvature invariants in quantum gravity theory. Third order
• The one-loop effective action and trace anomaly in four dimensions

Cited in

(2)

• One-loop electromagnetic correlators of SQED in power-law inflation
• Chiral gravitational waves produced in a helical magnetogenesis model

This page was built for publication: To \(B\) or not to \(B\): primordial magnetic fields from Weyl anomaly

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q1635142)