New Extraction of the Cosmic Birefringence from the Planck 2018 Polarization Data

Abstract

We search for evidence of parity-violating physics in the Planck 2018 polarization data, and report on a new measurement of the cosmic birefringence angle, $\beta$. The previous measurements are limited by the systematic uncertainty in the absolute polarization angles of the Planck detectors. We mitigate this systematic uncertainty completely by simultaneously determining $\beta$ and the angle miscalibration using the observed cross-correlation of the $E$- and $B$-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background and the Galactic foreground emission. We show that the systematic errors are effectively mitigated and achieve a factor-of-$2$ smaller uncertainty than the previous measurement, finding $\beta =0.35\pm 0.14°$ (68% C.L.), which excludes $\beta =0$ at $99.2$% C.L. This corresponds to the statistical significance of $2.4\sigma$.

6 pages, 2 figures, 1 table. Published in Physical Review Letters

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