Probing Anisotropic Cosmic Birefringence with Foreground-Marginalised SPT B-mode Likelihoods

Abstract

In this work, we construct foreground-marginalised versions of the SPT-3G D1 and SPTpol cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode polarisation likelihoods. The compression is performed using the CMB-lite framework and we use the resulting data sets to constrain anisotropic cosmic birefringence, parametrised by the amplitude of a scale-invariant anisotropic birefringence spectrum, A CB . Using the new SPT-3G data we report a upper limit on of 95% upper limit on A CB of 1.2 x 10 -4 , which tightens to 0.53 x 10 -4 when imposing a prior on the amplitude of gravitational lensing based on CMB lensing reconstruction analyses. These are the tightest constraints on anisotropic birefringence from BB power spectrum measurements to-date, demonstrating the constraining power of the South Pole Telescope. The likelihoods used in this work are made publicly available at https://github.com/lbalkenhol/candl_data