No Arabic abstract
We explore the reconstruction of the gravitational lensing field of the cosmic microwave background in real space showing that very little statistical information is lost when estimators of short range on the celestial sphere are used in place of the customary estimators in harmonic space, which are nonlocal and in principle require a simultaneous analysis of the entire sky without any cuts or excisions. Because virtually all the information relevant to lensing reconstruction lies on angular scales close to the resolution scale of the sky map, the gravitational lensing dilatation and shear fields (which unlike the deflection field or lensing potential are directly related to the observations in a local manner) may be reconstructed by means of quadratic combinations involving only very closely separated pixels. Even though harmonic space provides a more natural context for understanding lensing reconstruction theoretically, the real space methods developed here have the virtue of being faster to implement and are likely to prove useful for analyzing realistic maps containing a galactic cut and possibly numerous small excisions to exclude point sources that cannot be reliably subtracted.
Gravitational lensing of the CMB is a valuable cosmological signal that correlates to tracers of large-scale structure and acts as a important source of confusion for primordial $B$-mode polarization. State-of-the-art lensing reconstruction analyses use quadratic estimators, which are easily applicable to data. However, these estimators are known to be suboptimal, in particular for polarization, and large improvements are expected to be possible for high signal-to-noise polarization experiments. We develop a method and numerical code, $rm{LensIt}$, that is able to find efficiently the most probable lensing map, introducing no significant approximations to the lensed CMB likelihood, and applicable to beamed and masked data with inhomogeneous noise. It works by iteratively reconstructing the primordial unlensed CMB using a deflection estimate and its inverse, and removing residual lensing from these maps with quadratic estimator techniques. Roughly linear computational cost is maintained due to fast convergence of iterative searches, combined with the local nature of lensing. The method achieves the maximal improvement in signal to noise expected from analytical considerations on the unmasked parts of the sky. Delensing with this optimal map leads to forecast tensor-to-scalar ratio parameter errors improved by a factor $simeq 2 $ compared to the quadratic estimator in a CMB stage IV configuration.
The measurement and characterization of the lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is key goal of the current and next generation of CMB experiments. We perform a case study of a three-channel balloon-borne CMB experiment observing the sky at (l,b)=(250deg,-38deg) and attaining a sensitivity of 5.25 muK-arcmin with 8 angular resolution at 150 GHz, in order to assess whether the effect of polarized Galactic dust is expected to be a significant contaminant to the lensing signal reconstructed using the EB quadratic estimator. We find that for our assumed dust model, polarization fractions of about as low as a few percent may lead to a significant dust bias to the lensing convergence power spectrum. We investigated a parametric component separation method, proposed by Stompor et al. (2009), as well as a template cleaning method, for mitigating the effect of this dust bias. The template-based method recovers unbiased convergence power spectrum in all polarization fraction cases we considered, while for the component separation technique we find a dust contrast regime in which the accuracy of the profile likelihood spectral index estimate breaks down, and in which external information on the dust frequency scaling is needed. We propose a criterion for putting a requirement on the accuracy with which the dust spectral index must be estimated or constrained, and demonstrate that if this requirement is met, then the dust bias can be removed.
We perform the first simultaneous Bayesian parameter inference and optimal reconstruction of the gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), using 100 deg$^2$ of polarization observations from the SPTpol receiver on the South Pole Telescope. These data reach noise levels as low as 5.8 $mu$K-arcmin in polarization, which are low enough that the typically used quadratic estimator (QE) technique for analyzing CMB lensing is significantly sub-optimal. Conversely, the Bayesian procedure extracts all lensing information from the data and is optimal at any noise level. We infer the amplitude of the gravitational lensing potential to be $A_phi,{=},0.949,{pm},0.122$ using the Bayesian pipeline, consistent with our QE pipeline result, but with 17% smaller error bars. The Bayesian analysis also provides a simple way to account for systematic uncertainties, performing a similar job as frequentist bias hardening, and reducing the systematic uncertainty on $A_phi$ due to polarization calibration from almost half of the statistical error to effectively zero. Finally, we jointly constrain $A_phi$ along with $A_{rm L}$, the amplitude of lensing-like effects on the CMB power spectra, demonstrating that the Bayesian method can be used to easily infer parameters both from an optimal lensing reconstruction and from the delensed CMB, while exactly accounting for the correlation between the two. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the Bayesian approach on real data, and pave the way for future analysis of deep CMB polarization measurements with SPT-3G, Simons Observatory, and CMB-S4, where improvements relative to the QE can reach 1.5 times tighter constraints on $A_phi$ and 7 times lower effective lensing reconstruction noise.
Detailed measurements of the CMB lensing signal are an important scientific goal of ongoing ground-based CMB polarization experiments, which are mapping the CMB at high resolution over small patches of the sky. In this work we simulate CMB polarization lensing reconstruction for the $EE$ and $EB$ quadratic estimators with current-generation noise levels and resolution, and show that without boundary effects the known and expected zeroth and first order $N^{(0)}$ and $N^{(1)}$ biases provide an adequate model for non-signal contributions to the lensing power spectrum estimators. Small sky areas present a number of additional challenges for polarization lensing reconstruction, including leakage of $E$ modes into $B$ modes. We show how simple windowed estimators using filtered pure-$B$ modes can greatly reduce the mask-induced mean-field lensing signal and reduce variance in the estimators. This provides a simple method (used with recent observations) that gives an alternative to more optimal but expensive inverse-variance filtering.
Based on realistic simulations, we propose an hybrid method to reconstruct the lensing potential power spectrum, directly on PLANCK-like CMB frequency maps. It implies using a large galactic mask and dealing with a strong inhomogeneous noise. For l < 100, we show that a full-sky inpainting method, already described in a previous work, still allows a minimal variance reconstruction, with a bias that must be accounted for by a Monte-Carlo method, but that does not couple to the deflection field. For l>100 we develop a method based on tiling the cut-sky with local 10x10 degrees overlapping tangent planes (referred to in the following as patches). It requires to solve various issues concerning their size/position, non-periodic boundaries and irregularly sampled data after the sphere-to-plane projection. We show how the leading noise term of the quadratic lensing estimator applied onto an apodized patch can still be taken directly from the data. To not loose spatial accuracy, we developed a tool that allows the fast determination of the complex Fourier series coefficients from a bi-dimensional irregularly sampled dataset, without performing an interpolation. We show that the multi-patch approach allows the lensing power spectrum reconstruction with a very small bias, thanks to avoiding the galactic mask and lowering the noise inhomogeneities, while still having almost a minimal variance. The data quality can be assessed at each stage and simple bi-dimensional spectra build, which allows the control of local systematic errors.