Hypermagnetic gyrotropy, inflation and the baryon asymmetry of the Universe

Abstract

We investigate the production of the hypermagnetic gyrotropy when the electric and magnetic gauge couplings evolve at different rates, as it happens in the the relativistic theory of the Van der Waals forces. If a pseudo-scalar interaction breaks the duality symmetry of the corresponding equations, the gyrotropic configurations of the hypermagnetic fields can be amplified from the vacuum during an inflationary stage of expansion. After charting the parameter space of the model in terms of the rates of evolution of the magnetic and electric gauge couplings, we identify the regions where the gyrotropy is sufficiently intense to seed the baryon asymmetry of the Universe at the electroweak epoch while the backreaction constraints, the strong coupling bounds and the other astrophysical limits are concurrently satisfied.