Cosmic magnetic fields and dark energy in extended electromagnetism

Jose Beltrán Jiménez and Antonio L. Maroto

I shall discuss an extended version of electromagnetism in which the usual gauge fixing term is promoted into a physical one that introduces a new scalar state in the theory. This new state can be generated from quantum fluctuations during an inflationary era and, on super-Hubble scales, it gives rise to an effective cosmological constant. The value of such a cosmological constant coincides with the one inferred from observations as long as inflation took place at the electroweak scale. On the other hand, the new state also generates an effective electric charge on sub-Hubble scales that produces both vorticity and magnetic fields with coherent lengths as large as the present Hubble horizon.