English

Cosmic Birefringence from Planck Data Release 4

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2022-03-14 v2

Abstract

We search for the signature of parity-violating physics in the cosmic microwave background, called cosmic birefringence, using the Planck data release 4. We initially find a birefringence angle of β=0.30±0.11\beta=0.30\pm0.11 (68% C.L.) for nearly full-sky data. The values of β\beta decrease as we enlarge the Galactic mask, which can be interpreted as the effect of polarized foreground emission. Two independent ways to model this effect are used to mitigate the systematic impact on β\beta for different sky fractions. We choose not to assign cosmological significance to the measured value of β\beta until we improve our knowledge of the foreground polarization.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2201.07682,
  title  = {Cosmic Birefringence from Planck Data Release 4},
  author = {P. Diego-Palazuelos and J. R. Eskilt and Y. Minami and M. Tristram and R. M. Sullivan and A. J. Banday and R. B. Barreiro and H. K. Eriksen and K. M. Górski and R. Keskitalo and E. Komatsu and E. Martínez-González and D. Scott and P. Vielva and I. K. Wehus},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.07682},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

7 pages, 1 figure, 1 table. (v2) References added. Accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters

R2 v1 2026-06-24T08:55:23.415Z