Cosmological CPT Violation and CMB Polarization Measurements

TL;DR

This study investigates the potential of CMB polarization measurements to test CPT symmetry violations, constraining the rotation angle and assessing future experiment capabilities.

Contribution

It provides the first tight constraints on CPT violation via CMB polarization, considering systematic errors and future experiment sensitivities.

Findings

Current data suggest a 2.2 sigma hint of CPT violation.

Future experiments could improve rotation angle constraints by a factor of 15.

Gravitational CS effects are too small to constrain with current data.

Abstract

In this paper we study the possibility of testing Charge-Parity-Time Reversal (CPT) symmetry with cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. We consider two kinds of Chern-Simons (CS) term, electromagnetic CS term and gravitational CS term, and study their effects on the CMB polarization power spectra in detail. By combining current CMB polarization measurements, the seven-year WMAP, BOOMERanG 2003 and BICEP observations, we obtain a tight constraint on the rotation angle $\Delta\alpha=-2.28\pm1.02$ deg ($1\,\sigma$), indicating a $2.2\,\sigma$ detection of the CPT violation. Here, we particularly take the systematic errors of CMB measurements into account. After adding the QUaD polarization data, the constraint becomes $-1.34<\Delta\alpha<0.82$ deg at 95% confidence level. When comparing with the effect of electromagnetic CS term, the gravitational CS term could only generate TB and EB power spectra with much smaller amplitude. Therefore, the induced parameter $\epsilon$ can not be constrained from the current polarization data. Furthermore, we study the capabilities of future CMB measurements, Planck and CMBPol, on the constraints of $\Delta\alpha$ and $\epsilon$. We find that the constraint of $\Delta\alpha$ can be significantly improved by a factor of 15. Therefore, if this rotation angle effect can not be taken into account properly, the constraints of cosmological parameters will be biased obviously. For the gravitational CS term, the future Planck data still can not constrain $\epsilon$ very well, if the primordial tensor perturbations are small, $r <0.1$. We need the more accurate CMBPol experiment to give better constraint on $\epsilon$.