Pre-reheating Magnetogenesis in the Kinetic Coupling Model

Abstract

Recent blazar observations provide growing evidence for the presence of magnetic fields in the extragalactic regions. While a natural speculation is to associate the production to inflationary physics, it has been known that magnetogenesis solely from inflation is quite challenging. We therefore study a model in which a non-inflaton field $\chi$ coupled to the electromagnetic field through its kinetic term, $-I^2(\chi) F^2 /4$, continues to move after inflation until the completion of reheating. This leads to a post-inflationary amplification of the electromagnetic field. We compute all the relevant contributions to the curvature perturbation, including gravitational interactions, and impose the constraints from the CMB scalar fluctuations on the strength of magnetic fields. We, for the first time, explicitly verify both the backreaction and CMB constraints in a simple yet successful magnetogenesis scenario without invoking a dedicated low-scale inflationary model in the weak-coupling regime of the kinetic coupling model.