A Limit on Primordial Small-Scale Magnetic Fields from CMB Distortions

Abstract

Spatially varying primordial magnetic fields may be efficiently dissipated prior to the epoch of recombination due to the large viscosity of the baryon-photon fluid. We show that this dissipation may result in observable chemical potential mu and Compton y distortions in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) spectrum. Current upper limits on mu and y from FIRAS constrain magnetic fields to have strength B_0 < 3\times 10^{-8}Gauss (scaled to the present) between comoving coherence length \approx 400 pc and \approx 0.6 Mpc. This represents the strongest upper limit on small-scale primordial magnetic fields to date.