IGM Magnetogenesis

The intergalactic medium contains coherent magnetic fields at the level of B ~ 10⁻¹⁶ to 10⁻¹⁴ Gauss on Mpc scales, inferred from the absence of GeV secondary emission from blazars (which would be deflected by fields stronger than this lower limit) and from Faraday rotation measure statistics in the cosmic web. The origin of these large-scale intergalactic magnetic fields is a profound mystery in standard cosmology: Biermann battery and other astrophysical mechanisms generate fields only on small scales within structures, and no known mechanism efficiently amplifies and correlates magnetic field over coherence lengths of megaparsecs in the diffuse IGM. Primordial magnetogenesis during inflation or phase transitions can produce the required large-scale fields but requires new physics beyond the Standard Model and predicts field spectra that are difficult to reconcile with all observations simultaneously.

Successive Collision Theory provides a natural magnetogenesis mechanism grounded entirely in established physics: the superluminal collision itself generated large-scale magnetic fields through the relative motion of the two charged spacetime pockets. When two plasma-filled regions with relative velocity exceeding c collide and interpenetrate, the differential velocity of electrons and ions in the collision interface generates Biermann battery currents at the collision front. Unlike the small-scale Biermann battery in isolated astrophysical shocks, the SCT collision front spanned the entire overlap volume of the two pockets — a region corresponding to our entire observable universe — so the resulting magnetic field coherence length was set by the pocket dimensions rather than by a small-scale shock. This primordial magnetogenesis in the collision event produced magnetic fields coherent over the full scale of our observable patch, seeding the large-scale intergalactic fields subsequently observed.

The angular momentum inheritance mechanism ensures that the primordial collision-generated magnetic field was not isotropic but had a preferred orientation set by the collision geometry. The field was strongest along the collision front boundary and organized in loops around the angular momentum axis of the collision, producing the large-scale spiral structure of magnetic field coherence that observational constraints suggest. Subsequent turbulent amplification within forming structures amplified the field locally, but the large-scale coherent component retained the collision-geometry imprint throughout cosmic history. SCT therefore predicts that the large-scale intergalactic magnetic field should show a coherent preferred orientation aligned with the CMB quadrupole-octupole axis — the collision axis — a prediction testable with future Faraday rotation measure surveys from SKA and next-generation radio arrays that map the magnetic field orientation across the full observable sky.