Photon-photon interactions as a source of CMB circular polarization

2012/05/22 by Sawyer, R. F.
#Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1205.4969

Abstract

Photon-photon interactions mediated by the neutral hydrogen background can transform plane polarization into circular polarization, through completely forward processes, [gamma+gamma+atom-> gamma+ gamma+atom], in which only the photon polarizations are changed. The ratio of circular to plane polarization intensities is predicted to be at the level of several times 10^-5 for some regions of angular size less than 1/300 and with large plane polarizations.

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