Microwave Background Anisotropies from Alfven waves

Abstract

We investigate microwave background anisotropies in the presence of primordial magnetic fields. We show that a homogeneous field with fixed direction can amplify vector perturbations. We calculate the correlations of $δT/T$ explicitly and show that a large scale coherent field induces correlations between $a_{\ell-1,m}$ and $a_{\ell+1,m}$. We discuss constraints on amplitude and spectrum of a primordial magnetic field imposed by observations of CMB anisotropies.