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Register a new userCMB Polarization Systematics, Cosmological Birefringence and the Gravitational Waves Background
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Cosmic Microwave Background experiments must achieve very accurate calibration of their polarization reference frame to avoid biasing the cosmological parameters. In particular, a wrong or inaccurate calibration might mimic the presence of a gravitational wave background, or a signal from cosmological birefringence, a phenomenon characteristic of several non-standard, symmetry breaking theories of electrodynamics that allow for textit{in vacuo} rotation if the polarization direction of the photon. Noteworthly, several authors have claimed that the BOOMERanG 2003 (B2K) published polarized power spectra of the CMB may hint at cosmological birefringence. Such analyses, however, do not take into account the reported calibration uncertainties of the BOOMERanG focal plane. We develop a formalism to include this effect and apply it to the BOOMERanG dataset, finding a cosmological rotation angle $alpha=-4.3^circpm4.1^circ$. We also investigate the expected performances of future space borne experiment, finding that an overall miscalibration larger then $1^circ$ for Planck and $0.2circ$ for EPIC, if not properly taken into account, will produce a bias on the constraints on the cosmological parameters and could misleadingly suggest the presence of a GW background.
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We show that a non-minimal coupling of electromagnetism with background torsion can produce birefringence of the electromagnetic waves. This birefringence gives rise to a B-mode polarization of the CMB. From the bounds on B-mode from WMAP and BOOMERanG data, one can put limits on the background torsion at $xi_{1}T_{1}=(-3.35 pm 2.65) times 10^{-22} GeV^{-1}$.
In this paper, we will give a general introduction to the project of Ali CMB Polarization Telescope (AliCPT), which is a Sino-US joint project led by the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) and has involved many different institutes in China. It is the first ground-based Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization experiment in China and an integral part of Chinas Gravitational Waves Program. The main scientific goal of AliCPT project is to probe the primordial gravitational waves (PGWs) originated from the very early Universe. The AliCPT project includes two stages. The first stage referred to as AliCPT-1, is to build a telescope in the Ali region of Tibet with an altitude of 5,250 meters. Once completed, it will be the worldwide highest ground-based CMB observatory and open a new window for probing PGWs in northern hemisphere. AliCPT-1 telescope is designed to have about 7,000 TES detectors at 90GHz and 150GHz. The second stage is to have a more sensitive telescope (AliCPT-2) with the number of detectors more than 20,000. Our simulations show that AliCPT will improve the current constraint on the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ by one order of magnitude with 3 years observation. Besides the PGWs, the AliCPT will also enable a precise measurement on the CMB rotation angle and provide a precise test on the CPT symmetry. We show 3 years observation will improve the current limit by two order of magnitude.
Searching for the signal of primordial gravitational waves in the B-modes (BB) power spectrum is one of the key scientific aims of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization experiments. However, this could be easily contaminated by several foreground issues, such as the thermal dust emission. In this paper we study another mechanism, the cosmic birefringence, which can be introduced by a CPT-violating interaction between CMB photons and an external scalar field. Such kind of interaction could give rise to the rotation of the linear polarization state of CMB photons, and consequently induce the CMB BB power spectrum, which could mimic the signal of primordial gravitational waves at large scales. With the recent polarization data of BICEP2 and the joint analysis data of BICEP2/Keck Array and Planck, we perform a global fitting analysis on constraining the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ by considering the polarization rotation angle which can be separated into a background isotropic part and a small anisotropic part. Since the data of BICEP2 and Keck Array experiments have already been corrected by using the self-calibration method, here we mainly focus on the effects from the anisotropies of CMB polarization rotation angle. We find that including the anisotropies in the analysis could slightly weaken the constraints on $r$, when using current CMB polarization measurements. We also simulate the mock CMB data with the BICEP3-like sensitivity. Very interestingly, we find that if the effects of the anisotropic polarization rotation angle can not be taken into account properly in the analysis, the constraints on $r$ will be dramatically biased. This implies that we need to break the degeneracy between the anisotropies of the CMB polarization rotation angle and the CMB primordial tensor perturbations, in order to measure the signal of primordial gravitational waves accurately.
Cosmological CPT violation will rotate the polarized direction of CMB photons, convert partial CMB E mode into B mode and vice versa. It will generate non-zero EB, TB spectra and change the EE, BB, TE spectra. This phenomenon gives us a way to detect the CPT-violation signature from CMB observations, and also provides a new mechanism to produce B mode polarization. In this paper, we perform a global analysis on tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ and polarization rotation angles based on current CMB datasets with both low $ell$ (Planck, BICEP2/Keck Array) and high $ell$ (POLARBEAR, SPTpol, ACTPol). Benefited from the high precision of CMB data, we obtain the isotropic rotation angle $bar{alpha} = -0.01^circ pm 0.37^circ $ at 68% C.L., the variance of the anisotropic rotation angles $C^{alpha}(0)<0.0032,mathrm{rad}^2$, the scale invariant power spectrum $D^{alphaalpha}_{ell in [2, 350]}<4.71times 10^{-5} ,mathrm{rad}^2$ and $r<0.057$ at 95% C.L.. Our result shows that with the polarization rotation effect, the 95% upper limit on $r$ gets tightened by 17%.
We examine the use of the CMBs TE cross correlation power spectrum as a complementary test to detect primordial gravitational waves (PGWs). The first method used is based on the determination of the lowest multipole, $ell_0$, where the TE power spectrum, $C_{ell}^{TE}$, first changes sign. The second method uses Wiener filtering on the CMB TE data to remove the density perturbations contribution to the TE power spectrum. In principle this leaves only the contribution of PGWs. We examine two toy experiments (one ideal and another more realistic) to see their ability to constrain PGWs using the TE power spectrum alone. We found that an ideal experiment, one limited only by cosmic variance, can detect PGWs with a ratio of tensor to scalar metric perturbation power spectra $r=0.3$ at 99.9% confidence level using only the TE correlation. This value is comparable with current constraints obtained by WMAP based on the $2sigma$ upper limits to the B-mode amplitude. We demonstrate that to measure PGWs by their contribution to the TE cross correlation power spectrum in a realistic ground based experiment when real instrumental noise is taken into account, the tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r$, should be approximately three times larger.
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