Probing cosmic birefringence with polarized Sunyaev-Zel'dovich tomography

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential of polarized Sunyaev-Zel'dovich tomography to detect and characterize cosmic birefringence, which could indicate parity-violating physics in the dark sector, by analyzing small-scale CMB polarization fluctuations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method using pSZ tomography to measure the redshift dependence of cosmic birefringence and calibrate instrumental polarization, advancing the search for parity-violating dark sector physics.

Findings

pSZ tomography can infer the redshift dependence of cosmic birefringence.

It can help calibrate instrumental polarization orientations.

Potential to probe axion-like dark energy models with very low masses.

Abstract

If the physics behind dark energy and/or dark matter violates the parity symmetry assumed in the standard cosmological paradigm, the linear polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons can rotate due to their coupling to the dark sector. Recent 3$\sigma$ hints of this ``cosmic birefringence" in the EB spectrum of the CMB polarization motivates us to pursue new directions to independently validate and characterize the signal. Here, we explore the prospects to probe cosmic birefringence from small-scale fluctuations in the CMB using polarized Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (pSZ) tomography. We find that pSZ can be used to infer the redshift dependence of cosmic birefringence and also help calibrate the instrumental polarization orientation. To illustrate the prospects, we show that pSZ tomography may probe an axion-like dark energy model with masses $m_\phi \lesssim 10^{-32}$eV with $\mathcal{O}(0.1)$ degrees of rotation between reionization and recombination.