Primordial magnetic fields from metric perturbations

We study the amplification of electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations induced by the evolution of scalar metric perturbations at the end of inflation. Such perturbations break the conformal invariance of Maxwell equations in Friedmann-Robertson-Walker backgrounds and allow the growth of magnetic fields on super-Hubble scales. We estimate the strength of the fields generated by this mechanism on galactic scales and compare the results with the present bounds on the galactic dynamo seed fields.