Axion Dark Matter Induced Cosmic Microwave Background $B$-modes

Abstract

It was known that isocurvature perturbation of a nearly massless cosmological axion field can lead to rotation of $E$-mode polarization into $B$-mode polarization in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by the presence of a parity violating coupling of the field to the topological density of electromagnetism, resulting in a phenomenon known as anisotropic cosmic birefringence. In this {\em Letter}, we propose a new source of anisotropic cosmic birefringence induced by dark matter adiabatic density perturbation. If dark matter is ultralight axions that carry a coupling to photon, its adiabatic density fluctuations will induce anisotropic cosmic birefringence with a blue-tilted rotation power spectrum, thus generating CMB $B$-mode polarization on sub-degree angular scales. Using current POLARBEAR and SPTPol $B$-mode polarization data, we derive a constraint on the axion-photon coupling strength ($\beta$) and the axion mass ($m$), $\beta^2 (10^{-22}{\rm eV}/m)^2 < 8\times 10^{15}$. It is shown that the birefringence $B$ modes can dominate over CMB lensing $B$ modes at high $l$, manifesting as an excess power for $l>1500$ in future CMB lensing $B$-mode searches. In addition, we derive the lensing-rotation cross correlation that can be a potential test to the present model.