Cosmic birefrigence: cross-spectra and cross-bispectra with CMB anisotropies

Parity-violating extensions of Maxwell electromagnetism induce a rotation of the linear polarization plane of photons during propagation. This effect, known as cosmic bire-fringence, impacts on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations producing a mixing of E and B polarization modes which is otherwise null in the standard scenario. Such an effect is naturally parametrized by a rotation angle which can be written as the sum of an isotropic component alpha(0) and an anisotropic one delta alpha((n) over cap). In this paper we compute angular power spectra and bispectra involving delta alpha and the CMB temperature and polarization maps. In particular, contrarily to what happens for the cross-spectra, we show that even in absence of primordial cross-correlations between the anisotropic birefringence angle and the CMB maps, there exist non-vanishing three-point correlation functions carrying signatures of parity-breaking physics. Furthermore, we find that such angular bispectra still survive in a regime of purely anisotropic cosmic birefringence, which corresponds to the conservative case of having alpha(0) = 0. These bispectra represent an additional observable aimed at studying cosmic birefringence and its parity-violating nature beyond power spectrum analyses. They provide also a way to perform consistency checks for specific models of cosmic birefringence. Moreover, we estimate that among all the possible birefringent bispectra, and are the ones which contain the largest signal-to-noise ratio. Once the cosmic birefringence signal is taken to be at the level of current constraints, we show that these bispectra are within reach of future CMB experiments, as LiteBIRD.

Automated summary

This paper discusses the impact of cosmic birefringence induced by parity-violating extensions of Maxwell electromagnetism on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), and how to study this effect through the calculation of angular power spectra and bispectra. The study shows that even in the absence of primordial cross-correlations, non-vanishing three-point correlation functions carrying signatures of parity-breaking physics exist.