Weyl invariance and the conductivity of the protoinflationary plasma

Abstract

We consider a globally neutral Lorentzian plasma as a possible remnant of a preinflationary stage of expansion and pose the problem of the suitable initial conditions for the evolution of the large-scale electromagnetic inhomogeneities. During the protoinflationary regime the Weyl invariance of the Ohmic current guarantees that the comoving conductivity is approximately constant. The subsequent breaking of Weyl invariance by the masses of the charge carriers drives the conductivity to zero. The newly derived conducting initial conditions for the amplification of large-scale magnetic fields are contrasted with the conventional vacuum initial conditions. It is shown, in a specific class of examples, that when the number of inflationary efolds is close to minimal the effects of the conducting initial conditions cannot be neglected.

9 pages, no figures

References in corpus (5)

• Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Three Year Results: Implications for Cosmology
• Cosmology with inhomogeneous magnetic fields
• Large-scale magnetic fields in the inflationary universe
• Inflation with General Initial Conditions for Scalar Perturbations
• Hanbury Brown-Twiss interferometry and second-order correlations of inflaton quanta

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