Eur. Phys. J. C (2012) 72: 1928
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-012-1928-y

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

A complete 3D numerical study of the effects of pseudoscalar–photon mixing on quasar polarizations

¹ McWilliams Center for Cosmology, Department of Physics, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA
² Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, 208016, India
³ Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad, 211019, India

^* e-mail: pkjain@iitk.ac.in

Received: 19 October 2011
Revised: 29 December 2011
Published online: 20 March 2012

Abstract

We present the results of three-dimensional simulations of quasar polarizations in the presence of pseudoscalar–photon mixing in the intergalactic medium. The intergalactic magnetic field is assumed to be uncorrelated in wave vector space but correlated in real space. Such a field may be obtained if its origin is primordial. Furthermore we assume that the quasars, located at cosmological distances, have negligible initial polarization. In the presence of pseudoscalar–photon mixing we show, through a direct comparison with observations, that this may explain the observed large scale alignments in quasar polarizations within the framework of big bang cosmology. We find that the simulation results give a reasonably good fit to the observed data.