Odd-Parity Bipolar Spherical Harmonics
  Bipolar spherical harmonics (BiPoSHs) provide a general formalism for
quantifying departures in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from
statistical isotropy (SI) and from Gaussianity. However, prior work has focused
only on BiPoSHs with even parity. Here we show that there is another set of
BiPoSHs with odd parity, and we explore their cosmological applications. We
describe systematic artifacts in a CMB map that could be sought by measurement
of these odd-parity BiPoSH modes. These BiPoSH modes may also be produced
cosmologically through lensing by gravitational waves (GWs), among other
sources. We derive expressions for the BiPoSH modes induced by the weak lensing
of both scalar and tensor perturbations. We then investigate the possibility of
detecting parity-breaking physics, such as chiral GWs, by cross-correlating
opposite parity BiPoSH modes with multipole moments of the CMB polarization. We
find that the expected signal-to-noise of such a detection is modest.
