Recent progress in Affleck-Dine baryogenesis

In the MSSM, cosmological scalar field condensates formed along flat directions of the scalar potential (Affleck-Dine condensates) are typically unstable with respect to formation of Q-balls, a type of non-topological soliton. I discuss the creation and growth of the quantum seed fluctuations which catalyse the collapse of the condensate. In D-term inflation models, the fluctuations of squark fields in the flat directions also give rise to isocurvature density fluctuations stored in the Affleck-Dine condensate. After the condensate breaks up, these can be perturbations in the baryon number, or, in the case where the present neutralino density comes directly from B-ball decay, perturbations in the number of dark matter neutralinos. The latter case results in a large enhancement of the isocurvature perturbation, which should be observable by PLANCK.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures; invited talk at COSMO9

Flat direction condensate instabilities in the MSSM

Coherently oscillating scalar condensates formed along flat directions of the MSSM scalar potential are unstable with respect to spatial perturbations if the potential is flatter than phi^2, resulting in the formation of non-topological solitons such as Q-balls. Using renormalization group we calculate the corrections to the phi^2 potential for a range of flat directions and show that unstable condensates are a generic feature of the MSSM. Exceptions arise for an experimentally testable range of stop and gluino masses when there are large admixtures of stops in the flat direction scalar.Comment: 9 pages, 9 encapsulated postscript figure

Ferromagnetic Vacuum and Galactic Magnetic Fields

Non-abelian gauge theories may have a ferromagnet-like vacuum with a non-zero magnetic field, which also exists at finite temperature. We argue that the formation of the ferromagnet-like vacuum at GUT scales gives rise to a Maxwell magnetic field imprinted on the comoving plasma, and that it is energetically favourable to align the field in different correlation volumes. This results in a coherent magnetic field pertaining the whole universe, with a magnitude B_{now}\simeq 10^{-14}\G, which is of the correct size to serve as the seed field for the galactic dynamo.Comment: 6 pages, no figures, NORDITA-94/6