Gravitational Lensing of Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization [CEA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6646


Primary fluctuations in both temperature and polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) reflect the properties of the Universe from the Big Bang until the photons decoupled from matter 380,000 years later. These primary fluctuations are then lensed by large-scale structures (such as clusters of galaxies and filaments of dark matter), with the result that the distribution and properties of dark matter, including the masses of neutrinos, can be determined more accurately by extracting the lensing information than through studying the primary fluctuations alone. Polarization lensing can give cleaner, higher resolution results than temperature lensing. The correlation of lensed CMB polarization with large-scale structure, traced through the Cosmic Infrared Background, was recently detected; however, this correlation does not trace all structure and depends on the relationship between the infrared flux from the galaxies and the underlying mass distribution. Here we report the detection of gravitational lensing directly from CMB polarization measurements. With these data, we have made a census of essentially all structure integrated along the line of sight through the full depth of the observable Universe on 30 square degrees of the sky, and we find good agreement with expectations from the standard Lambda cold-dark matter cosmology.

Read this paper on arXiv…

Tue, 24 Dec 13
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