Reexamining aspects of spacetime-symmetry breaking with CMB polarization

Abstract

The linear polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is highly sensitive to parity-violating physics at the surface of last scattering, which might cause mixing of E and B modes, an effect known as {\it cosmic birefringence}. This has until recently been problematic to detect due to its degeneracy with the instrument polarization miscalibration angle. Recently, a possible detection of a non-zero cosmic-birefringence angle was reported at $\beta={0.35^\circ}\pm 0.14^\circ$, where the miscalibration angle was simultaneously determined and subtracted from the analysis. Starting from this claim, we exploit a simple map of $\beta$ to the coupling constant of a parity-violating term in a generic effective-field theory for Lorentz and CPT violation. We show that the reported constraint on $\beta$ is consistent with current one-sided upper bounds from CMB studies of spacetime-symmetry breaking, and we discuss the implications and interpretation of this detection.Comment: 6 pages, no figure