Birefringence, CMB polarization, and magnetized B-mode

Even in the absence of a sizable tensor contribution, a B-mode polarization can be generated because of the competition between a pseudoscalar background and predecoupling magnetic fields. By investigating the dispersion relations of a magnetoactive plasma supplemented by a pseudoscalar interaction, the total B-mode polarization is shown to depend not only upon the plasma and Larmor frequencies but also on the pseudoscalar rotation rate. If the (angular) frequency channels of a given experiment are larger than the pseudoscalar rotation rate, the only possible source of (frequency-dependent) B-mode autocorrelations must be attributed to Faraday rotation. In the opposite case the pseudoscalar contribution dominates and the total rate becomes, in practice, frequency independent. The B-mode cross correlations can be used, under certain conditions, to break the degeneracy by disentangling the two birefringent contributions.