Schwinger effect impacting primordial magnetogenesis

Understand

We explore the enhancement of an electromagnetic field in an inflationary background with an anti-conductive plasma of scalar particles.

• The scalar particles are created by Schwinger effect in curved spacetime and backreact to the electromagnetic field.
• The possibility of a negative conductivity was recently put forward in the context of the renormalization of the Schwinger induced current in de Sitter spacetime.
• While a negative conductivity enhances the produced magnetic field, we find that it is too weak to seed the observed intergalactic magnetic field today.