Related papers: Constraints on cosmic birefringence using $E$-mode…
Nondestructive spin-resolved imaging of ultracold atomic gases requires calculating the differences of the refractive indices seen by two circular probe polarizations. Perfect overlap of the two images, corresponding to two different…
Decomposing the shear signal into E and B-modes properly, i.e. without leakage of B-modes into the E-mode signal and vice versa, has been a long-standing problem in weak gravitational lensing. At the two-point level this problem was…
A recent study of the rotation of the plane of polarization of light from 160 cosmological sources claims to find significant evidence for cosmological anisotropy. We point out methodological weaknesses of that study, and reanalyze the same…
Birefringence, an inherent characteristic of optically anisotropic materials, is widely utilized in various imaging applications ranging from material characterizations to clinical diagnosis. Polarized light microscopy enables…
Recently, based on a novel analysis of the Planck satellite data, a hint of a uniform rotation of the polarization of cosmic microwave background photons, called isotropic cosmic birefringence, has been reported. The suggested rotation…
Multiply connected space sections of the universe on a scale smaller than the horizon size can leave an imprint on cosmic microwave background polarization maps, in such a way that the so-called ``circles-in-the-sky'' method can be used to…
STPpol, POLARBEAR and BICEP2 have recently measured the cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode polarization in various sky regions of several tens of square degrees and obtained BB power spectra in the multipole range 20-3000, detecting…
A tremendous international effort is currently dedicated to observing the so-called $B$-modes of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarisation. At the unprecedented sensitivity level that the new generation of CMB experiments aims to…
Weak gravitational lensing by the intervening large-scale structure of the Universe induces high-order correlations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization fields. We construct minimum variance estimators of…
We calculate the cosmic microwave background (CMB) $B$-mode power spectrum resulting from anisotropic cosmic birefringence, without relying on the thin approximation of the last scattering surface. Specifically, we consider the influence of…
It was known that isocurvature perturbation of a nearly massless cosmological axion field can lead to rotation of $E$-mode polarization into $B$-mode polarization in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by the presence of a parity…
We revisit the evidence for CMB birefringence in the context of a rich Axiverse. Using probability density functions (PDFs) for various axion parameters, such as the mass and axion decay constant, we construct the PDF for the cosmic…
We discuss the analysis of polarization experiments with particular emphasis on those that measure the Stokes parameters on a ring on the sky. We discuss the ability of these experiments to separate the $E$ and $B$ contributions to the…
We study the possibility of constraining the energy dependence of cosmological birefringence by using CMB polarization data. We consider four possible behaviors, characteristic of different theoretical scenarios: energy-independent…
We predict the polarization of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons that results from a cosmic bubble collision. The polarization is purely E-mode, symmetric around the axis pointing towards the collision bubble, and has several…
The polarization plane of the cosmic microwave background radiation can be rotated either in a magnetized plasma or in the presence of a quintessential background with pseudoscalar coupling to electromagnetism. A unified treatment of these…
We present constraints on isotropic cosmic birefringence induced by axion-like particles (ALPs), derived from the analysis of cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization measurements obtained with the high-frequency channels of Planck.…
Detection of B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation is one of the frontiers of observational cosmology. Because they are an order of magnitude fainter than E-modes, it is quite a challenge to detect B-modes.…
Observations of the polarization of the cosmic microwave backround (CMB) have the potential to place much tighter constraints on cosmological parameters than observations of the fluctuations in temperature alone. We discuss using CMB…
Optical-window birefringence is frequently a major obstacle in experiments measuring changes in the polarization state of light traversing a sample under investigation. It can contribute a signal indistinguishable from that due to the…