Testing CPT symmetry with CMB measurements

¹ Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Science, PO Box 918-4, Beijing 100049, PR China e-mail: xiajq@mail.ihep.ac.cn
² Department of Astronomy, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, PR China
³ Fakultät für Physik, Universität Bielefeld, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany

Received: 17 January 2008
Accepted: 27 February 2008

Abstract

Aims. We study the possibility of testing Charge-Parity-Time Reversal symmetry (CPT) with cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements.

Methods. Working with an effective lagrangian of the photon with CPT violation , which causes the polarization vectors of the propagating CMB photons to be rotated, we determine the rotation angle using the BOOMERanG 2003 and the WMAP3 angular power spectra.

Results. In this analysis, we have included the newly-released TC and GC () information of WMAP3 and found deg at a  confidence level.

Conclusions. This result slightly increases the significance for the CPT violation obtained in our previous paper (Feng et al. 2006)  deg (1σ). Furthermore, we examine the constraint on the rotation angle from the simulated polarization data with Planck precision. Our results show that the future Planck measurement will be sensitive to  at the level of 0.057 deg and will be able to test the CPT symmetry with a higher precision.