Constraints on cosmological birefringence from PLANCK and Bicep2/Keck data

Journal
Date Issued
2016
Author(s)
•
Gerbino, M.
•
Natoli, P.
•
Pagano, L.
•
Mandolesi, N.
•
Melchiorri, A.
•
Molinari, D.
DOI
Description
We are grateful to D.Contreras and D.Scott for useful discussions. This paper is based on observations obtained with the satellite PLANCK (http://www.esa.int/Planck), an ESA science mission with instruments and contributions directly funded by ESA Member States, NASA, and Canada. We acknowledge the use of computing facilities at NERSC (USA), of the HEALPix package [23], and of the Planck Legacy Archive (PLA). We acknowledge the support by ASI/INAF Agreement 2014-024-R.0 and 2014-024-R.1 for the Planck LFI Activity of Phase E2. MG and LP acknowledge support by the research grant Theoretical Astroparticle Physics number 2012CPPYP7 under the program PRIN 2012 funded by MIUR and by TASP (I.S. INFN).
Abstract
The polarization of cosmic microwave background (CMB) can be used to constrain cosmological birefringence, the rotation of the linear polarization of CMB photons potentially induced by parity violating physics beyond the standard model. This effect produces non-null CMB cross correlations between temperature and B mode-polarization, and between E- and B-mode polarization. Both cross-correlations are otherwise null in the standard cosmological model. We use the recently released 2015 PLANCK likelihood in combination with the Bicep2/Keck/Planck (BKP) likelihood to constrain the birefringence angle α. Our findings, that are compatible with no detection, read α = 0.0° ± 1.3° (stat) ± 1° (sys) for PLANCK data and α = 0.30° ± 0.27° (stat) ± 1° (sys) for BKP data. We finally forecast the expected improvements over present constraints when the PLANCK BB, TB and EB spectra at high l will be included in the analysis.
Volume
2016
Issue
6
Start page
001
Uri
Url
Issn Identifier
1475-7516
Ads BibCode
2016JCAP...06..001G
Rights
open.access
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