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arXiv · 2510.07928

Probing Anisotropic Cosmic Birefringence with Foreground-Marginalised SPT B-mode Likelihoods

L. Balkenhol·A. Coerver·C. L. Reichardt·J. A. Zebrowski
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Abstract

In this work, we construct foreground-marginalised versions of the SPT-3G D1 and SPTpol cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode polarisation likelihoods. The compression is performed using the CMB-lite framework and we use the resulting data sets to constrain anisotropic cosmic birefringence, parametrised by the amplitude of a scale-invariant anisotropic birefringence spectrum, $A_{\rm CB}$. Using the new SPT-3G data we report a $95\%$ upper limit on $A_{\rm CB}$ of $ 1.2\times 10^{-4}$, which tightens to $0.53\times 10^{-4}$ when imposing a prior on the amplitude of gravitational lensing based on CMB lensing reconstruction analyses. These are the tightest constraints on anisotropic birefringence from BB power spectrum measurements to-date, demonstrating the constraining power of the South Pole Telescope. The likelihoods used in this work are made publicly available at https://github.com/lbalkenhol/candl_data

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L. Balkenhol, A. Coerver, C. L. Reichardt, J. A. Zebrowski. 2025-10-09. Probing Anisotropic Cosmic Birefringence with Foreground-Marginalised SPT B-mode Likelihoods. https://doi.org/10.33232/001c.147459

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