Cosmic Birefringence

IAP weekly specialised seminars / 11 February 2022
Eiichiro Komatsu (Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik, Garching, Germany)
Polarised light of the cosmic microwave background, the remnant light of the Big Bang, is sensitive to parity-violating physics. In this presentation we report on new measurements of parity violation, called “cosmic birefringence”, from polarisation data of the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Planck satellite. The statistical significance of the measured signal is about 3 sigma. If confirmed with higher statistical significance in future, it would have profound implications for the elusive nature of dark matter and dark energy.