Searching for Anisotropic Cosmic Birefringence with Polarization Data from SPTpol

Abstract

We present a search for anisotropic cosmic birefringence in 500 deg${}^2$ 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 non-detection is translated into an upper limit on the amplitude of the scale-invariant cosmic rotation power spectrum, $L(L+1)C_L^{\alpha \alpha }/2\pi <0.10\times 10^{-4}$ rad${}^2$ (0.033 deg${}^2$, 95% C.L.). This upper limit can be used to place constraints on the strength of primordial magnetic fields, $B_{1\mathrm{Mpc}}<17\mathrm{nG}$ (95% C.L.), and on the coupling constant of the Chern-Simons electromagnetic term $g_{a\gamma }<4.0\times 10^{-2}/H_I$ (95% C.L.), where $H_I$ 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 non-vanishing in certain theoretical scenarios, and find no detectable signal. We perform a suite of systematics and consistency checks and find no evidence for contamination.

arXiv comment17 pages, 7 figures - new subsection on non-Gaussian foregrounds, conclusions unchanged - updated to match published version on PRD

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