LiteBIRD science goals and forecasts: constraining isotropic cosmic birefringence

the LiteBIRD Collaboration and Giardiello, Serena 2025. LiteBIRD science goals and forecasts: constraining isotropic cosmic birefringence. [Online]. arXiv: Cornell University. Available at: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2503.22322

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Abstract

Cosmic birefringence (CB) is the rotation of the photons' linear polarisation plane during propagation. Such an effect is a tracer of parity-violating extensions of standard electromagnetism and would probe the existence of a new cosmological field acting as dark matter or dark energy. It has become customary to employ cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarised data to probe such a phenomenon. Recent analyses on Planck and WMAP data provide a hint of detection of the isotropic CB angle with an amplitude of around at the level of to . In this work, we explore the LiteBIRD capabilities in constraining such an effect, accounting for the impact of the more relevant systematic effects, namely foreground emission and instrumental polarisation angles. We build five semi-independent pipelines and test these against four different simulation sets with increasing complexity in terms of non-idealities. All the pipelines are shown to be robust and capable of returning the expected values of the CB angle within statistical fluctuations for all the cases considered. We find that the uncertainties in the CB estimates increase with more complex simulations. However, the trend is less pronounced for pipelines that account for the instrumental polarisation angles. For the most complex case analysed, we find that LiteBIRD will be able to detect a CB angle of with a statistical significance ranging from to , depending on the pipeline employed, where the latter uncertainty corresponds to a total error budget of the order of

Item Type:	Website Content
Date Type:	Submission
Status:	Submitted
Schools:	Schools > Physics and Astronomy
Additional Information:	Full list of author's/collaborators can be found on the webpage https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2503.22322
Publisher:	Cornell University
Last Modified:	10 Jul 2025 11:22
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/177299

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