N-flationary magnetic fields

There is increasing interest in the role played by pseudo Nambu–Goldstone bosons (pNGBs) in the construction of string-inspired models of inflation. In these models the inflaton is expected to be coupled to gauge fields, and will lead to the generation of magnetic fields that can be of cosmological interest. We study the production of such fields mainly focusing on the model of N-flation, where the collective effect of several pNGBs drives inflation. Because the fields produced are maximally helical, inverse cascade processes in the primordial plasma significantly increase their coherence length. We discuss under what conditions inflation driven by pNGBs can account for the cosmological magnetic fields observed. A constraint on the parameters of this class of inflationary scenarios is also derived by requiring that the magnetic field does not backreact on the inflating background.