Improved Constraints on Cosmic Birefringence from the WMAP and Planck Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization Data

Abstract

The observed pattern of linear polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons is a sensitive probe of physics violating parity symmetry under inversion of spatial coordinates. A new parity-violating interaction might have rotated the plane of linear polarization by an angle $\beta$ as the CMB photons have been traveling for more than 13 billion years. This effect is known as "cosmic birefringence." In this paper, we present new measurements of cosmic birefringence from a joint analysis of polarization data from two space missions, Planck and WMAP. This dataset covers a wide range of frequencies from 23 to 353 GHz. We measure $\beta =0.342_{-0.091^{\circ }}^{\circ +0.094^{\circ }}$ (68% C.L.) for nearly full-sky data, which excludes $\beta =0$ at 99.987% C.L. This corresponds to the statistical significance of $3.6\sigma$. There is no evidence for frequency dependence of $\beta$. We find a similar result, albeit with a larger uncertainty, when removing the Galactic plane from the analysis.

9 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. The code to reproduce the results of this paper is available at https://github.com/LilleJohs/Cosmic_Birefringence. Accepted for publication in Physical Review D

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