Cardiff University | Prifysgol Caerdydd ORCA
Online Research @ Cardiff 
WelshClear Cookie - decide language by browser settings

Searching for anisotropic cosmic birefringence with polarization data from SPTpol

Bianchini, F., Wu, W. L.K., Ade, P. A. R. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5127-0401, Anderson, A. J., Austermann, J. E., Avva, J. S., Balkenhol, L., Baxter, E., Beall, J. A., Bender, A. N., Benson, B. A., Bleem, L. E., Carlstrom, J. E., Chang, C. L., Chaubal, P., Chiang, H. C., Chou, T.?L., Citron, R., Corbett Moran, C., Crawford, T. M., Crites, A. T., de Haan, T., Dobbs, M. A., Everett, W., Gallicchio, J., George, E. M., Gilbert, A., Gupta, N., Halverson, N. W., Henning, J. W., Hilton, G. C., Holder, G. P., Holzapfel, W. L., Hrubes, J. D., Huang, N., Hubmayr, J., Irwin, K. D., Knox, L., Lee, A. T., Li, D., Lowitz, A., Manzotti, A., McMahon, J. J., Meyer, S. S., Millea, M., Mocanu, L. M., Montgomery, J., Nadolski, A., Natoli, T., Nibarger, J. P., Noble, G., Novosad, V., Omori, Y., Padin, S., Patil, S., Pryke, C., Reichardt, C. L., Ruhl, J. E., Saliwanchik, B. R., Schaffer, K. K., Sievers, C., Simard, G., Smecher, G., Stark, A. A., Story, K. T., Tucker, C. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1851-3918, Vanderlinde, K., Veach, T., Vieira, J. D., Wang, G., Whitehorn, N. and Yefremenko, V. 2020. Searching for anisotropic cosmic birefringence with polarization data from SPTpol. Physical Review D 102 (8) , 083504. 10.1103/PhysRevD.102.083504

[thumbnail of PhysRevD.102.083504.pdf]
Preview
PDF - Published Version
Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

We present a search for anisotropic cosmic birefringence in 500  deg2 of southern sky observed at 150 GHz with the SPTpol camera on the South Pole Telescope. We reconstruct a map of cosmic polarization rotation anisotropies using higher-order correlations between the observed cosmic microwave background (CMB) E and B fields. We then measure the angular power spectrum of this map, which is found to be consistent with zero. The nondetection is translated into an upper limit on the amplitude of the scale-invariant cosmic rotation power spectrum, L(L+1)CααL/2π<0.10×10−4  rad2 (0.033  deg2, 95% C.L.). This upper limit can be used to place constraints on the strength of primordial magnetic fields, B1  Mpc<17  nG (95% C.L.), and on the coupling constant of the Chern-Simons electromagnetic term gaγ<4.0×10−2/HI (95% C.L.), where HI is the inflationary Hubble scale. For the first time, we also cross-correlate the CMB temperature fluctuations with the reconstructed rotation angle map, a signal expected to be nonvanishing in certain theoretical scenarios, and find no detectable signal. We perform a suite of systematics and consistency checks and find no evidence for contamination.

Item Type: Article
Date Type: Publication
Status: Published
Schools: Physics and Astronomy
Publisher: American Physical Society
ISSN: 2470-0010
Date of First Compliant Deposit: 29 October 2020
Date of Acceptance: 17 August 2020
Last Modified: 07 May 2023 12:03
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/136036

Citation Data

Cited 26 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item Edit Item

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

View more statistics