Improved constraints on cosmic birefringence from the WMAP and Planck cosmic microwave background polarization data

The observed pattern of linear polarization of the cosmic microwave background photons is a sensitive probe of physics violating parity symmetry under inversion of spatial coordinates. A new parity-violating interaction might have rotated the plane of linear polarization by an angle

β

as the cosmic microwave background photons have been traveling for more than 13 billion years. This effect is known as “cosmic birefringence.” In this paper, we present new measurements of cosmic birefringence from a joint analysis of polarization data from two space missions,

P l a n c k

and WMAP. This dataset covers a wide range of frequencies from 23 to 353 GHz. We measure

β = 0.342 °_{- 0.091 °}^{+ 0.094 °}

[68% confidence level (CL)] for nearly full-sky data, which excludes

β = 0

at 99.987% CL. This corresponds to the statistical significance of

3.6 σ

. There is no evidence for frequency dependence of

β

. We find a similar result, albeit with a larger uncertainty, when removing the Galactic plane from the analysis.

Note:

9 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. The code to reproduce the results of this paper is available at https://github.com/LilleJohs/Cosmic_Birefringence. Accepted for publication in Physical Review D

cosmic background radiation: polarization
polarization: linear
frequency: dependence
parity: violation
parity: symmetry
birefringence
photon
satellite: Planck
WMAP
phantom

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