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PRODID:Faculty of Science and Engineering - Research
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SUMMARY:Seminar: Zizang Qiu (Edinburgh) 
DESCRIPTION;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE: Title: Warm Inflation and Thermalised Cosmic Magnetic Fields=0D=0A=
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Warm inflation modifies the standard supercooled picture of inflation by allowing the inflaton to interact continuously with other degrees of freedom during accelerated expansion. These interactions can ultimately sustain a radiation bath that is close to thermal equilibrium. The inflaton sector is naturally viewed as an open quantum system from this perspective, with dissipation and stochastic noise arising as effective descriptions of coupling the inflaton to environmental fields. The first part of the talk will introduce the basic physical picture of warm inflation with primordial density perturbations of classical thermal origin.=0D=0A=
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As an example of how warm-inflationary physics links to observable signatures, I will then discuss an application to primordial cosmic magnetic fields. Magnetic fields are ubiquitously observed across astrophysical and cosmological scales, yet standard inflationary predictions fall dramatically short from current observations. The origin of this discrepancy lies in the conformal invariance of classical electromagnetism in an FLRW universe, which freezes the magnetic flux in the high conductivity limit. Conventional approaches introduce non-minimal couplings to break this symmetry but are tightly constrained and often lead to strong-coupling or backreaction issues. This obstruction is formalised in the Green–Kobayashi no-go theorem, which assumes a Bunch–Davies vacuum initial state. Embedding the gauge field in a thermal state, however, changes the problem: finite-temperature effects effectively lift the conformal constraint and provide a significant thermodynamic boost to magnetic-field amplitudes.
LOCATION:Room 610, G.O. Jones Building 
DTSTART:20260507T140000
DTEND:20260507T150000
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