Polarization of the Microwave Background in Defect Models

1997/04/23 by Uroš Seljak, Uros Seljak, Ue-Li Pen +2 · 96 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Anisotropy #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Computational physics #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Degree of polarization #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #Microwave #Optics #Physics #Polarization (electrochemistry) #Quantum #Quantum decoherence #Quantum mechanics #Scattering #Spectral line #astro-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.79.1615

published in Physical Review Letters 79(9), 1615-1618 (American Physical Society) · 4 pages, 3 figures, RevTeX file

arxiv created 1997/04/23 · openalex publication_date 1997/09/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

We compute the polarization power spectra for global strings, monopoles, textures, and nontopological textures, and compare them to inflationary models. We find that topological defect models predict a significant ( \ensuremath∼1 \ensuremathμK) contribution to magnetic type polarization on degree angular scales, which is produced by the large vector component of the defect source. We also investigate the effect of decoherence on polarization. It leads to a smoothing of acoustic oscillations both in temperature and polarization power spectra and strongly suppresses the cross correlation between temperature and polarization relative to inflationary models. Both effects should be testable with the next generation of CMB satellites.

Citations

• Signature of Gravity Waves in the Polarization of the Microwave Background
• Causality, Randomness, and the Microwave Background
• Doppler Peaks from Active Perturbations
• Statistics of cosmic microwave background polarization

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