Searching for Anisotropic Cosmic Birefringence with Polarization Data from SPTpol

• Main Authors: Bianchini, F., Wu, W. L. K., Ade, P. A. R., Anderson, A. J., Austermann, J. E., Avva, J. S., Balkenhol, L., Baxter, E., Beall, J. A., Bender, A. N., Benson, B. A., Bleem, L. E., Carlstrom, J. E., Chang, C. L., Chaubal, P., Chiang, H. C., Chou, T. L., Citron, R., Moran, C. Corbett, Crawford, T. M., Crites, A. T., de Haan, T., Dobbs, M. A., Everett, W., Gallicchio, J., George, E. M., Gilbert, A., Gupta, N., Halverson, N. W., Henning, J. W., Hilton, G. C., Holder, G. P., Holzapfel, W. L., Hrubes, J. D., Huang, N., Hubmayr, J., Irwin, K. D., Knox, L., Lee, A. T., Li, D., Lowitz, A., Manzotti, A., McMahon, J. J., Meyer, S. S., Millea, M., Mocanu, L. M., Montgomery, J., Nadolski, A., Natoli, T., Nibarger, J. P., Noble, G., Novosad, V., Omori, Y., Padin, S., Patil, S., Pryke, C., Reichardt, C. L., Ruhl, J. E., Saliwanchik, B. R., Schaffer, K. K., Sievers, C., Simard, G., Smecher, G., Stark, A. A., Story, K. T., Tucker, C., Vanderlinde, K., Veach, T., Vieira, J. D., Wang, G., Whitehorn, N., Yefremenko, V.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: arXiv 2020
• Subjects: Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics astro-ph.CO; High Energy Physics - Phenomenology hep-ph; FOS Physical sciences; Hubble; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2006.08061; https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.08061

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, $L(L+1)C_L^{αα}/2π< 0.10 \times 10^{-4}$ 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 \rm Mpc} < 17 {\rm nG} $ (95% C.L.), and on the coupling constant of the Chern-Simons electromagnetic term $g_{aγ} < 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. : 17 pages, 7 figures - new subsection on non-Gaussian foregrounds, conclusions unchanged - updated to match published version on PRD