The Cosmic Microwave Background And Pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone Bosons: Searching For Lorentz Violations In The Cosmos

TL;DR

This paper reviews how pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone bosons can cause polarization rotation in the CMB and proposes using the Polarbear experiment to detect Lorentz violations within the Standard-Model Extension framework.

Contribution

It introduces a method to constrain Lorentz-violating physics using CMB polarization data from the Polarbear experiment, focusing on pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone bosons.

Findings

Reviewed polarization rotation mechanisms involving pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone bosons.

Proposed a new approach to constrain Lorentz violation with CMB data.

Outlined potential bounds on Lorentz-violating parameters.

Abstract

One of the most powerful probes of new physics is the polarized Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The detection of a nonzero polarization angle rotation between the CMB surface of last scattering and today could provide evidence of Lorentz-violating physics. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First we review one popular mechanism for polarization rotation of CMB photons: the pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson. Second, we propose a method to use the Polarbear experiment to constrain Lorentz-violating physics in the context of the Standard-Model Extension, a framework to standardize a large class of potential Lorentz-violating terms in particle physics.