The early reionization with the primordial magnetic fields

Abstract

The early reionization of the intergalactic medium, which is favored from the WMAP temperature-polarization cross-correlations, contests the validity of the standard scenario of structure formation in the cold dark matter cosmogony. It is difficult to achieve early enough star formation without rather extreme assumptions such as very high escape fraction of ionizing photons from proto-galaxies or a top-heavy initial mass function. Here we propose an alternative scenario that is additional fluctuations on small scales induced by primordial magnetic fields trigger the early structure formation. We found that ionizing photons from Population III stars formed in dark haloes can easily reionize the universe by $z \simeq 15$ if the strength of primordial magnetic fields is larger than $0.6 \times 10^{-9}$Gauss.