Magnetic field generation from cosmological perturbations

We discuss generation of magnetic field from cosmological perturbations. We consider the evolution of three component plasma (electron, proton and photon) evaluating the collision term between elecrons and photons up to the second order. The collision term is shown to induce electric current, which then generate magnetic field. There are three contributions, two of which can be evaluated from the first-order quantities, while the other one is fluid vorticity which is purely second order. We compute numerically the magnitudes of the former contributions and shows that the amplitude of the produced magnetic field is about similar to 10(-19) G at 10 kpc comoving scale at present. Compared to astrophysical and inflationary mechanisms for seed-field generation, our study suffers from much less ambiguities concerning unknown physics and/or processes. (c) 2006 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.