Magnetogenesis from axion-SU(2) inflation

Abstract

We describe a novel proposal for inflationary magnetogenesis by identifying the non-Abelian sector of Spectator Chromo Natural Inflation (SCNI) with the SU(2)L sector of the Standard Model. This mechanism relies on the recently discovered attractor of SCNI in the strong backreaction regime, where the gauge fields do not decay on super-horizon scales and their backreaction leads to a stable new trajectory for the rolling axion field. The large super-horizon gauge fields are partly transformed after the electroweak phase transition into electromagnetic fields. The strength and correlation length of the resulting helical magnetic fields depend on the inflationary Hubble scale and the details of the SCNI sector. For suitable parameter choices we show that the strength of the resulting magnetic fields having correlation lengths around 1 Mpc are consistent with the required intergalactic magnetic fields for explaining the spectra of high energy γ rays from distant blazars.