English

Cosmic Birefringence from Planck Public Release 4

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2022-03-10 v1

Abstract

We search for the signature of parity-violating physics in the Cosmic Microwave Background using Planck polarization data from the Public Release 4 (PR4 or NPIPE\mathtt{NPIPE}). For nearly full-sky data, we initially find a birefringence angle β=0.30±0.11\beta=0.30^\circ\pm0.11^\circ (68%68\%~C.L.). We also find that the values of β\beta decrease as we enlarge the Galactic mask, which can be interpreted as the effect of polarized foreground emission. We use two independent approaches to model this effect and mitigate its impact on β\beta. Although results are promising, and the good agreement between both models is encouraging, we do not assign cosmological significance to the measured value of β\beta until we improve our knowledge of the foreground polarization. Acknowledging that the miscalibration of polarization angles is not the only instrumental systematic that can create spurious TB and EB correlations, we also perform a detailed study of NPIPE\mathtt{NPIPE} end-to-end simulations to prove that our measurements of β\beta are not significantly affected by any of the known systematics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2203.04830,
  title  = {Cosmic Birefringence from Planck Public 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:2203.04830},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

8 pages, 2 figures, contribution to the 2022 Cosmology session of the 56th Rencontres de Moriond

R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:07:32.369Z