Cosmological Birefringence: an Astrophysical test of Fundamental Physics

Abstract

We review the methods used to test for the existence of cosmological birefringence, i.e. a rotation of the plane of linear polarization for electromagnetic radiation traveling over cosmological distances, which might arise in a number of important contexts involving the violation of fundamental physical principles. The main methods use: (1) the radio polarization of radio galaxies and quasars, (2) the ultraviolet polarization of radio galaxies, and (3) the cosmic microwave background polarization. We discuss the main results obtained so far, the advantages and disadvantages of each method, and future prospects.

To appear in the Proceedings of the JENAM 2010 Symposium "From Varying Couplings to Fundamental Physics", held in Lisbon, 6-10 Sept. 2010

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Cited by in corpus (9)

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• Detecting Axion-like Dark Matter with Linearly Polarized Pulsar Light
• WMAP 7 year constraints on CPT violation from large angle CMB anisotropies
• Spacetime structure and asymmetric metric from the premetric formulation of electromagnetism
• Estimating the weak-lensing rotation signal in radio cosmic shear surveys
• Skewon field and cosmic wave propagation
• Dilaton field and cosmic wave propagation
• New constraints on cosmic polarization rotation from the ACTPol cosmic microwave background B-Mode polarization observation and the BICEP2 constraint update
• Cosmological Ohm's law and dynamics of non-minimal electromagnetism