Detectability of Galactic Faraday Rotation in multiwavelength CMB observations

Abstract

We introduce a new cross-correlation method to detect and verify the astrophysical origin of Faraday Rotation (FR) in multiwavelength surveys. FR is well studied in radio astronomy from radio point sources but the λ² suppression of FR makes detecting and accounting for this effect difficult at millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelengths. Therefore, statistical methods are used to attempt to detect FR in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Most estimators of the FR power spectrum rely on single-frequency data. In contrast, we investigate the correlation of polarized CMB maps with FR measure maps from radio point sources. We show a factor of ∼30 increase in sensitivity over single-frequency estimators and predict detections exceeding 10σ significance for a CMB-S4-like experiment. Improvements in observations of FR from current and future radio polarization surveys will greatly increase the usefulness of this method.