TeV blazars offer an exciting prospect for discovering cosmological magnetic fields and for probing high energy processes, including CP violation, in the early universe. We propose a method for reconstructing both the non-helical and the helical magnetic field correlators using observations of cascade photons from TeV blazars.
The magnetic helicity has paramount significance in nonlinear saturation of galactic dynamo. We argue that the magnetic helicity conservation is violated at the lepton stage in the evolution of early Universe. As a result, a cosmological magnetic field which can be a seed for the galactic dynamo obtains from the beginning a substantial magnetic helicity which has to be taken into account in the magnetic helicity balance at the later stage of galactic dynamo.
A variety of observations impose upper limits at the nano Gauss level on magnetic fields that are coherent on inter-galactic scales while blazar observations indicate a lower bound $sim 10^{-16}$ Gauss. Such magnetic fields can play an important astrophysical role, for example at cosmic recombination and during structure formation, and also provide crucial information for particle physics in the early universe. Magnetic fields with significant energy density could have been produced at the electroweak phase transition. The evolution and survival of magnetic fields produced on sub-horizon scales in the early universe, however, depends on the magnetic helicity which is related to violation of symmetries in fundamental particle interactions. The generation of magnetic helicity requires new CP violating interactions that can be tested by accelerator experiments via decay channels of the Higgs particle.
We present a detailed analysis of the radio synchrotron emission induced by WIMP dark matter annihilations and decays in extragalactic halos. We compute intensity, angular correlation, and source counts and discuss the impact on the expected signals of dark matter clustering, as well as of other astrophysical uncertainties as magnetic fields and spatial diffusion. Bounds on dark matter microscopic properties are then derived, and, depending on the specific set of assumptions, they are competitive with constraints from other indirect dark matter searches. At GHz frequencies, dark matter sources can become a significant fraction of the total number of sources with brightness below the microJansky level. We show that, at this level of fluxes (which are within the reach of the next-generation radio surveys), properties of the faint edge of differential source counts, as well as angular correlation data, can become an important probe for WIMPs.
We present magnetization and magnetostriction studies of the insulating perovskite LaCoO3 in magnetic fields approaching 100 T. In marked contrast with expectations from single-ion models, the data reveal two distinct first-order spin transitions and well-defined magnetization plateaux. The magnetization at the higher plateau is only about half the saturation value expected for spin-1 Co3+ ions. These findings strongly suggest collective behavior induced by strong interactions between different electronic -- and therefore spin -- configurations of Co3+ ions. We propose a model of these interactions that predicts crystalline spin textures and a cascade of four magnetic phase transitions at high fields, of which the first two account for the experimental data.
We examine bounds on adiabatic and isocurvature density fluctuations from $mu$-type spectral distortions of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Studies of such distortion are complementary to CMB measurements of the spectral index and its running, and will help to constrain these parameters on significantly smaller scales. We show that a detection on the order of $mu sim 10^{-7}$ would strongly be at odds with the standard cosmological model of a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of adiabatic perturbations. Further, we find that given the current CMB constraints on the isocurvature mode amplitude, a nearly scale-invariant isocurvature mode (common in many curvaton models) cannot produce significant $mu$-distortion. Finally, we show that future experiments will strongly constrain the amplitude of the isocurvature modes with a highly blue spectrum as predicted by certain axion models.