B polarization of cosmic background radiation from second-order scattering sources

Abstract

B-mode polarization of the cosmic background radiation is induced from purely scalar primordial sources at second order in perturbations of the homogeneous, isotropic universe. We calculate the B-mode angular power spectrum C_l^{BB} sourced by the second-order scattering term in the full second-order Boltzmann equations for the polarized radiation phase-space density, which have recently become available. We find that at l\approx 200 the second-order effect is comparable to the first-order effect for a tensor-to-scalar ratio of r=10^{-6}, and to about 2\cdot 10^{-4} at l\approx 1000. It is always negligible relative to the weak-lensing induced contribution.

32 pages

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• The intrinsic bispectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background [PhD thesis]
• Impact of anisotropic stress of free-streaming particles on gravitational waves induced by cosmological density perturbations
• The intrinsic B-mode polarisation of the Cosmic Microwave Background
• Weak lensing induced by second-order vector mode
• Impact of polarisation on the intrinsic CMB bispectrum
• Magnetic field spectrum at cosmological recombination revisited
• CMB B-mode non-Gaussianity: optimal bispectrum estimator and Fisher forecasts
• Unified approach to secondary effects on the CMB B-mode polarization
• The parity-odd Intrinsic Bispectrum
• CMB anisotropies from patchy reionisation and diffuse Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects
• Lensing anomalies from the epoch of reionisation