Search

Polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is sensitive to new physics violating parity symmetry, such as the presence of a pseudoscalar "axionlike" field. Such a field may be responsible for early dark energy (EDE), which is active prior to recombination and provides a solution to the so-called Hubble tension. The EDE field coupled to photons in a parity-violating manner would rotate the plane of linear polarization of the CMB and produce a cross-correlation power spectrum of E- and B-mode polarization fields with opposite parities. In this Letter, we fit the EB power spectrum predicted by the photon-axion coupling of the EDE model with a potential V(ϕ)∝[1-cos(ϕ/f)]^{3} to polarization data from Planck. We find that the unique shape of the predicted EB power spectrum is not favored by the data and obtain a first constraint on the photon-axion coupling constant, g=(0.04±0.16)M_{Pl}^{-1} (68% C.L.), for the EDE model that best fits the CMB and galaxy clustering data. This constraint is independent of the miscalibration of polarization angles of the instrument or the polarized Galactic foreground emission. Our limit on g may have important implications for embedding EDE in fundamental physics, such as string theory.

We search for evidence of parity-violating physics in the Planck 2018 polarization data and report on a new measurement of the cosmic birefringence angle β. The previous measurements are limited by the systematic uncertainty in the absolute polarization angles of the Planck detectors. We mitigate this systematic uncertainty completely by simultaneously determining β and the angle miscalibration using the observed cross-correlation of the E- and B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background and the Galactic foreground emission. We show that the systematic errors are effectively mitigated and achieve a factor-of-2 smaller uncertainty than the previous measurement, finding β=0.35±0.14  deg (68% C.L.), which excludes β=0 at 99.2% C.L. This corresponds to the statistical significance of 2.4σ.

The local expansion rate of the Universe is parametrized by the Hubble constant, [Formula: see text], the ratio between recession velocity and distance. Different techniques lead to inconsistent estimates of [Formula: see text] Observations of Type Ia supernovae (SNe) can be used to measure [Formula: see text], but this requires an external calibrator to convert relative distances to absolute ones. We use the angular diameter distance to strong gravitational lenses as a suitable calibrator, which is only weakly sensitive to cosmological assumptions. We determine the angular diameter distances to two gravitational lenses, [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] megaparsec, at redshifts [Formula: see text] and 0.6304. Using these absolute distances to calibrate 740 previously measured relative distances to SNe, we measure the Hubble constant to be [Formula: see text] kilometers per second per megaparsec., (Copyright © 2019 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.)

While detection of the "local form" bispectrum of primordial perturbations would rule out all single-field inflation models, multifield models would still be allowed. We show that multifield models described by the δN formalism obey an inequality between fNL and one of the local-form trispectrum amplitudes, τNL, such that τNL >1/2(6/5fN)(2) with a possible logarithmic scale dependence, provided that 2-loop terms are small. Detection of a violation of this inequality would rule out most of multifield models, challenging inflation as a mechanism for generating the primoridal perturbations.

The first year data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe are used to place stringent constraints on the topology of the Universe. We search for pairs of circles on the sky with similar temperature patterns along each circle. We restrict the search to back-to-back circle pairs, and to nearly back-to-back circle pairs, as this covers the majority of the topologies that one might hope to detect in a nearly flat universe. We do not find any matched circles with radius greater than 25 degrees. For a wide class of models, the nondetection rules out the possibility that we live in a universe with topology scale smaller than 24 Gpc.