Magnetic Misalignment of Interstellar Dust Filaments

Abstract

We present evidence for scale-independent misalignment of interstellar dust filaments and magnetic fields. We estimate the misalignment by comparing millimeter-wave dust-polarization measurements from Planck with filamentary structures identified in neutral-hydrogen (HI) measurements from HI4PI. We find that the misalignment angle displays a scale independence (harmonic coherence) for features larger than the HI4PI beam width ($16.2^{\prime }$). We additionally find a spatial coherence on angular scales of $\mathcal{O}(1^{\circ })$. We present several misalignment estimators formed from the auto- and cross-spectra of dust-polarization and HI-based maps, and we also introduce a map-space estimator. Applied to large regions of the high-Galactic-latitude sky, we find a global misalignment angle of $\sim 2^{\circ }$, which is robust to a variety of masking choices. By dividing the sky into small regions, we show that the misalignment angle correlates with the parity-violating $TB$ cross-spectrum measured in the Planck dust maps. The misalignment paradigm also predicts a dust $EB$ signal, which is of relevance in the search for cosmic birefringence but as yet undetected; the measurements of $EB$ are noisier than of $TB$, and our correlations of $EB$ with misalignment angle are found to be weaker and less robust to masking choices. We also introduce an HI-based dust-polarization template constructed from the Hessian matrix of the HI intensity, which is found to correlate more strongly than previous templates with Planck dust $B$ modes.

31 pages, 18 figures

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• Filamentary Dust Polarization and the Morphology of Neutral Hydrogen Structures
• Modeling parity-violating spectra in Galactic dust polarization with filaments and its applications to cosmic birefringence searches
• Optical modeling of systematic uncertainties in detector polarization angles for the Atacama Cosmology Telescope
• How bad could it be? Modelling the 3D complexity of the polarised dust signal using moment expansion
• Tomographic constraint on anisotropic cosmic birefringence
• BICEP/Keck XXI: Constraints on Early-Universe Parity Violation from Multipole-Dependent Birefringence