English

Planck constraints on Cosmic Birefringence and its cross-correlation with the CMB

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2024-01-23 v1

Abstract

Cosmic birefringence is the in-vacuo, frequency independent rotation of the polarization plane of linearly polarized radiation, induced by a parity-violating term in the electromagnetic Lagrangian. We implement an harmonic estimator for the birefringence field that only relies on the CMB E to B mode cross-correlation, thus suppressing the effect of cosmic variance from the temperature field. We derive constraints from Planck public releases 3 and 4, revealing a cosmic birefringence power spectrum consistent with zero at about 2σ2\sigma up to multipole L=1500L=1500. Moreover, we find that the cross-correlations of cosmic birefringence with the CMB T-, E- and B-fields are also well compatible with null. The latter two cross-correlations are provided here for the first time up to L=1500L=1500.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2401.11973,
  title  = {Planck constraints on Cosmic Birefringence and its cross-correlation with the CMB},
  author = {G. Zagatti and M. Bortolami and A. Gruppuso and P. Natoli and L. Pagano and G. Fabbian},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.11973},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

30 pages, 13 figures. To be submitted to JCAP. Code available https://github.com/paganol/alpha_lm . Data available https://github.com/giorgiazagatti/CB_Planck_maps_spectra.git