A New Probe of Cosmic Birefringence Using Galaxy Polarization and Shapes

We propose a new method to search for parity-violating new physics via measurements of cosmic birefringence and demonstrate its power in detecting the topological effect originating from an axion string network with an axion-photon coupling as a motivated source of cosmic birefringence. The method, using large galaxy samples, exploits an empirical correlation between the polarization direction of the integrated radio emission from a spiral galaxy and its apparent shape. We devise unbiased minimum-variance quadratic estimators for discrete samples of galaxies with both integrated radio polarization and shape measurements. Assuming a synergy with overlapping optical imaging surveys, we forecast the sensitivity to polarization rotation of the forthcoming SKA radio continuum surveys of spiral galaxies out to z ~ 1.5. The angular noise power spectrum of polarization rotation using our method can be lower than that expected from CMB Stage-IV experiments, when assuming a wide survey covering ~ 1000\, deg² and reaching an RMS flux of ~ 1\,μ Jy. Our method will be complementary to CMB-based methods as it will be subject to different systematics. It can be generalized to probe time-varying or redshift-varying birefringence signals.