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Photon mass from inflation

Tomislav Prokopec, Ola Tornkvist, Richard Woodard

astro-pharXiv:astro-ph/0205331

Abstract

We consider vacuum polarization from massless scalar electrodynamics in de Sitter inflation. The theory exhibits a 3+1 dimensional analogue of the Schwinger mechanism in which a photon mass is dynamically generated. The mechanism is generic for light scalar fields that couple minimally to gravity. The non-vanishing of the photon mass during inflation may result in magnetic fields on cosmological scales.

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