2011/06/30 by Levon Pogosian, Amit Yadav, Amit P. S. Yadav +2 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Anisotropy #Astrophysics #CMB cold spot #Computational physics #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Faraday effect #Magnetic field #Physics #Polarization (electrochemistry) #Quantum electrodynamics #Quantum mechanics #Radiative transfer #Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology #Spectral density #astro-ph.CO #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.84.043530
published as Phys.Rev.D84:043530,2011 · 17 pages, 5 figures; window functions and the accompanying code are available at http://www.sfu.ca/~levon/faraday.html; Typos fixed. Eqs in Secs 2 and 3 converted to Gaussian natural units, a reference added, results unchanged from version 2. Includes changes in the erratum of the journal version
openalex publication_date 2011/08/29 · arxiv created 2011/09/28 · arxiv updated 2011/09/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Faraday rotation induced B modes can provide a distinctive signature of primordial magnetic fields because of their characteristic frequency dependence and because they are only weakly damped on small scales, allowing them to dominate B modes from other sources. By numerically solving the full cosmic microwave background radiative transport equations, we study the B-mode power spectrum induced by stochastic magnetic fields that have significant power on scales smaller than the thickness of the last scattering surface. Constraints on the magnetic field energy density and inertial scale are derived from WMAP 7-year data, and are stronger than the big bang nucleosynthesis bound for a range of parameters. Observations of the cosmic microwave background polarization at smaller angular scales are crucial to provide tighter constraints or a detection.