Primordial Magnetic Fields and Electroweak Baryogenesis

In this contribution we will shortly review the main mechanism through which primordial magnetic fields may affect the electroweak baryogenesis. It is shown that although strong magnetic fields might enhance the strength of the electroweak phase transition, no benefit is found for baryogenesis once the effect of the field on the sphaleron rate is taken into account. The possible role of hypermagnetic helicity for the electroweak baryogenesis is shortly discussed.Comment: 10 pages, 1 fig. Plenary talk presented at the COSMO99 Conference, Trieste, Italy, 27 Sept - 3 Oct, 199

CR electrons and positrons: what we have learned in the latest three years and future perspectives

After the PAMELA finding of an increasing positron fraction above 10 GeV, the experimental evidence for the presence of a new electron and positron spectral component in the cosmic ray zoo has been recently confirmed by Fermi-LAT. We show that a simple phenomenological model which assumes the presence of a primary electron and positron extra component allows a consistent description of all available data sets. We then describe the most relevant astrophysical uncertainties which still prevent to determine the electron+positron source properties from those data and the perspectives of forthcoming experiments.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, Proceeding of the 3th ICATPP Conference on Astroparticle, Particle, Space Physics and Detectors for Physics Applications, Villa Olmo (Como), 3-7 October 2011

Gyro-induced acceleration of magnetic reconnection

The linear and nonlinear evolution of magnetic reconnection in collisionless high-temperature plasmas with a strong guide field is analyzed on the basis of a two-dimensional gyrofluid model. The linear growth rate of the reconnecting instability is compared to analytical calculations over the whole spectrum of linearly unstable wave numbers. In the strongly unstable regime (large \Delta '), the nonlinear evolution of the reconnecting instability is found to undergo two distinctive acceleration phases separated by a stall phase in which the instantaneous growth rate decreases. The first acceleration phase is caused by the formation of strong electric fields close to the X-point due to ion gyration, while the second acceleration phase is driven by the development of an open Petschek-like configuration due to both ion and electron temperature effects. Furthermore, the maximum instantaneous growth rate is found to increase dramatically over its linear value for decreasing diffusion layers. This is a consequence of the fact that the peak instantaneous growth rate becomes weakly dependent on the microscopic plasma parameters if the diffusion region thickness is sufficiently smaller than the equilibrium magnetic field scale length. When this condition is satisfied, the peak reconnection rate asymptotes to a constant value.Comment: Accepted for publication on Physics of Plasma