Improved Constraints on Cosmic Birefringence from the WMAP and Planck Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization Data

Eskilt, Johannes R.; Komatsu, Eiichiro

doi:10.48550/arxiv.2205.13962

Cited by 7 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…The reported signal is isotropic and consistent with a rotation angle of β = 0.342 • +0.094 • −0.091 • (68% C.L. ), independent of the photon frequency [18].…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 57%

“…For comparison, the black line represents C EE l multiplied by a constant. We find that C EB l has a wide variety of shapes, which are different from C EE l commonly assumed in the data analysis [15][16][17][18]. One can understand the shape of C EB…”

Section: Cosmic Birefringence From Edementioning

confidence: 67%

“…Cosmic birefringence is a rotation of the plane of linear polarization of photons [11][12][13], which induces the cross-correlation between parity-even E and parity-odd B modes in the CMB polarization field [14]. A tantalizing hint of cosmic birefringence has been found by the recent analyses of the WMAP and Planck data [15][16][17][18]. The reported signal is isotropic and consistent with a rotation angle of β = 0.342 • +0.094 • −0.091 • (68% C.L.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Isotropic cosmic birefringence from early dark energy

Murai¹,

Naokawa²,

Namikawa³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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“…The reported signal is isotropic and consistent with a rotation angle of β = 0.342 • +0.094 • −0.091 • (68% C.L. ), independent of the photon frequency [18].…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 57%

Section: Cosmic Birefringence From Edementioning

confidence: 67%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Isotropic cosmic birefringence from early dark energy

Murai¹,

Naokawa²,

Namikawa³

et al. 2022

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…Cosmic birefringence can potentially be isotropic, with a constant rotation independent of direction on the sky, or a direction-dependent anisotropic rotation. Several recent analyses of Planck polarization data find a tantalizing hint of isotropic birefringence [19][20][21]. Cosmic birefringence therefore has gained growing interest; for a recent review see, e.g., [22]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of Anisotropic Birefringence on Measuring Cosmic Microwave Background Lensing

Cai¹,

Guan²,

Namikawa³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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The power spectrum of cosmic microwave background lensing is a powerful tool for constraining fundamental physics such as the sum of neutrino masses and the dark energy equation of state. Current lensing measurements primarily come from distortions to the microwave background temperature field, but the polarization lensing signal will dominate upcoming experiments with greater sensitivity. Cosmic birefringence refers to the rotation of the linear polarization direction of microwave photons propagating from the last scattering surface to us, which can be induced by parityviolating physics such as axion-like dark matter or primordial magnetic fields. We find that, for an upcoming CMB-S4-like experiment, if there exists the scale-invariant anisotropic birefringence with an amplitude corresponding to the current 95% upper bound, the measured lensing power spectrum could be biased by up to a factor of few at small scales, L 1000. We show that the bias scales linearly with the amplitude of the scale-invariant birefringence spectrum. The signal-to-noise of the contribution from anisotropic birefringence is larger than unity even if the birefringence amplitude decreases to ∼ 5% of the current upper bound. Our results indicate that a measurement and characterization of the anisotropic birefringence is important for lensing analysis in future low-noise polarization experiments.

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“…2 Determining whether the CMB obeys parity symmetry is a topic of great current relevance. Recently, tentative evidence for P-violation has been reported using CMB birefringence [34][35][36], as well as the large-scale distribution of galaxies [31,37], with the latter using the approach first proposed in [29]. Given that systematic effects such as unaccounted-for cosmic dust [e.g.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Do the CMB Temperature Fluctuations Conserve Parity?

Philcox¹

2023

Preprint

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Observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) have cemented the notion that the largescale Universe is both statistically homogeneous and isotropic. But is it invariant also under mirror reflections? To probe this we require parity-sensitive statistics: for scalar observables, the simplest is the four-point function. We make the first measurements of the parity-odd CMB trispectrum, focusing on the large-scale (2 < < 510) temperature anisotropies measured by Planck. This is facilitated by new maximum-likelihood estimators for binned correlators, which account for mask convolution and leakage between even-and odd-parity components, and achieve optimal variances within ≈ 20%. We perform a blind test for parity violation by comparing a χ 2 statistic from Planck to theoretical expectations, using two suites of simulations to account for the possible likelihood non-Gaussianity and residual foregrounds. We find consistency at the ≈ 0.5σ level, yielding no evidence for parity violation, with roughly 250× the squared sensitivity of large scale structure measurements (according to mode-counting arguments), and with the advantage of linear physics, Gaussian statistics, and accurate mocks. The measured trispectra can be used to constrain physical models of inflationary parity violation, including Ghost Inflation, Cosmological Collider scenarios, and Chern-Simons gauge fields. Considering eight such models, we find no evidence for new physics, with a maximal detection significance of 2.0σ. These results suggest that the recent parity excesses seen in the BOSS galaxy survey are not primordial in origin. Tighter constraints can be wrought by including smaller scales (though rotational invariance washes out the flat-sky limit) and adding polarization data.1 These can also be generated by anisotropic (parity-conserving) inflationary models, though this generates only off-diagonal contributions [e.g., 15-19]. 2 Note that new physics models generically modify the scalar and tensor CMB in different ways, thus it remains useful to look at the temperature four-point function after a non-detection of the B-mode two-point functions.

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Improved Constraints on Cosmic Birefringence from the WMAP and Planck Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization Data

Cited by 7 publications

References 66 publications

Isotropic cosmic birefringence from early dark energy

Isotropic cosmic birefringence from early dark energy

Impact of Anisotropic Birefringence on Measuring Cosmic Microwave Background Lensing

Do the CMB Temperature Fluctuations Conserve Parity?

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