CMB lensing reconstruction biases in cross-correlation with large-scale structure probes [CEA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1906.08760


The cross-correlation between cosmic microwave background (CMB) gravitational lensing and large-scale structure tracers will be an important cosmological probe in the coming years. Quadratic estimators provide a simple and powerful (if suboptimal) way to reconstruct the CMB lensing potential and are widely used. For Gaussian fields, the cross-correlation of a quadratic-estimator CMB lensing reconstruction with a tracer is exactly unbiased if the power spectra are known and consistent analytic lensing mode response functions are used. However, the bispectrum induced by non-linear large-scale structure growth and post-Born lensing can introduce an additional bias term ($N_L^{(3/2)}$) in the cross-correlation spectrum, similar to the $N_L^{(3/2)}$ bias in the auto-spectrum demonstrated in recent works. We give analytic flat-sky results for the cross-correlation bias using approximate models for the post-Born and large-scale structure cross-bispectra, and compare with N-body simulation results using ray-tracing techniques. We show that the bias can be at the 5-15\% level in all large-scale structure cross-correlations using small-scale CMB temperature lensing reconstruction, but is substantially reduced using polarization-based lensing estimators or simple foreground-projected temperature estimators. The relative magnitude of these effects is almost three times higher than in the CMB lensing auto-correlation, but is small enough that it can be modelled to sufficient precision using simple analytic models. We show that $N_L^{(3/2)}$ effects in cross-correlation will be detected with high significance when using data of future surveys and could affect systematic effects marginalization in cosmic shear measurements mimicking galaxy intrinsic alignment.

Read this paper on arXiv…

G. Fabbian, A. Lewis and D. Beck
Fri, 21 Jun 19
50/56

Comments: submitted to JCAP, comments welcome