2008/12/15 by Massimo Giovannini, Kerstin E. Kunze · 2 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Physics and Astronomy · #Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism Studies #Ionosphere and magnetosphere dynamics #Solar and Space Plasma Dynamics #astro-ph #gr-qc #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.79.087301
published as Phys.Rev.D79:087301,2009 · 8 pages, 2 figures
arxiv created 2008/12/15 · openalex publication_date 2009/04/01 · arxiv updated 2010/04/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Even in the absence of a sizable tensor contribution, a B-mode polarization can be generated because of the competition between a pseudoscalar background and predecoupling magnetic fields. By investigating the dispersion relations of a magnetoactive plasma supplemented by a pseudoscalar interaction, the total B-mode polarization is shown to depend not only upon the plasma and Larmor frequencies but also on the pseudoscalar rotation rate. If the (angular) frequency channels of a given experiment are larger than the pseudoscalar rotation rate, the only possible source of (frequency-dependent) B-mode autocorrelations must be attributed to Faraday rotation. In the opposite case the pseudoscalar contribution dominates and the total rate becomes, in practice, frequency independent. The B-mode cross correlations can be used, under certain conditions, to break the degeneracy by disentangling the two birefringent contributions.