Circular polarization of the cosmic microwave background from vector and tensor perturbations

Abstract

Circular polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) can be induced by Faraday conversion of the primordial linearly polarized radiation as it propagates through a birefringent medium. Recent work has shown that the dominant source of birefringence from primordial density perturbations is the anisotropic background CMB. Here we extend prior work to allow for the additional birefringence that may arise from primordial vector and tensor perturbations. We derive the formulas for the power spectrum of the induced circular polarization and apply those to the standard cosmology. We find the root-variance of the induced circular polarization to be $\sqrt{<V^2>}\sim 3\times 10^{-14}$ for scalar perturbations and $\sqrt{<V^2>}\sim 7\times 10^{-18}(r/0.06)$ for tensor perturbations with a tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$.

15 pages, 2 figures, v2: minor changes, version accepted for publication in PRD

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Cited by in corpus (18)

• Introductory Notes on Non-linear Electrodynamics and its Applications
• High precision modeling of polarized signals: Moment expansion method generalized to spin-2 fields
• Probing Lorentz-violating electrodynamics with CMB polarization
• Two-year Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) Observations: A Measurement of Circular Polarization at 40 GHz
• CMB circular and B-mode polarization from new interactions
• Chiral photons from chiral gravitational waves
• Two-year Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) Observations: A First Detection of Atmospheric Circular Polarization at Q Band
• Electron cooling with graphene-insulator-superconductor tunnel junctions and applications to fast bolometry
• CMB $V$ modes from photon-photon forward scattering revisited
• Impact of half-wave plate systematics on the measurement of cosmic birefringence from CMB polarization
• Physics Beyond The Standard Model with Circular Polarization in the CMB and CMB-21cm Cross-Correlation
• CMB polarization as a tool to constrain the optical properties of the Universe
• Impact of half-wave plate systematics on the measurement of CMB $B$-mode polarization
• B-mode Power Spectrum of CMB via Polarized Compton Scattering
• Cross-correlation of the Polarizations of the 21-cm and Cosmic Microwave Backgrounds
• Standard Model Prediction for Cosmological 21cm Circular Polarization
• High-energy photon hologram of a photon gas
• Cosmology of Gravi-Axions