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We investigate correlations induced by gravitational lensing on simulated cosmic microwave background data of experiments with an incomplete sky coverage and their effect on inferences from the South Pole Telescope data. These correlations agree well with the theoretical expectations, given by the sum of super-sample and intra-sample lensing terms, with only a typically negligible $sim$ 5% discrepancy in the amplitude of the super-sample lensing effect. Including these effects we find that lensing constraints are in $3.0sigma$ or $2.1sigma$ tension between the SPT polarization measurements and Planck temperature or lensing reconstruction constraints respectively. If the lensing-induced covariance effects are neglected, the significance of these tensions increases to $3.5sigma$ or $2.5sigma$. Using the standard scaling parameter $A_L$ substantially underestimates the significance of the tension once other parameters are marginalized over. By parameterizing the super-sample lensing through the mean convergence in the SPT footprint, we find a hint of underdensity in the SPT region. We also constrain extra sharpening of the CMB acoustic peaks due to missing smoothing of the peaks by super-sample lenses at a level that is much smaller than the lens sample variance. Finally, we extend the usual shift in the means statistic for evaluating tensions to non-Gaussian posteriors, generalize an approach to extract correlation modes from noisy simulated covariance matrices, and present a treatment of correlation modes not as data covariances but as auxiliary model parameters.
We analyze the final release of the Planck satellite data to constrain the gravitational lensing potential in a model-independent manner. The amount of lensing determined from the smoothing of the acoustic peaks in the temperature and polarization power spectra is 2$sigma$ too high when compared with the measurements using the lensing reconstruction and 2.8$sigma$ too high when compared with $Lambda$CDM expectation based on the unlensed portion of the temperature and polarization power spectra. The largest change from the previous data release is the $Lambda$CDM expectation, driven by improved constraints to the optical depth to reionization. The anomaly still is inconsistent with actual gravitational lensing, given that the lensing reconstruction constraints are discrepant independent of the model. Within the context of $Lambda$CDM, improvements in its parameter constraints from lensing reconstruction bring this tension to 2.1$sigma$ and from further adding baryon acoustic oscillation and Pantheon supernova data to a marginally higher 2.2$sigma$. Once these other measurements are included, marginalizing this lensing-like anomaly cannot substantially resolve tensions with low-redshift measurements of $H_0$ and $S_8$ in $Lambda$CDM, $Lambda$CDM+$N_mathrm{eff}$ or $Lambda$CDM+$sum m_ u$; furthermore the artificial strengthening of constraints on $sum m_ u$ is less than 20%.
We discuss the effects of inhomogeneous sky-coverage on CMB lens reconstruction, focusing on application to the recently launched Planck satellite. We discuss the mean-field which is induced by noise inhomogeneities, as well as three approaches to lens reconstruction in this context: an optimal maximum-likelihood approach which is computationally expensive to evaluate, and two suboptimal approaches which are less intensive. The first of these is only sub-optimal at the five per-cent level for Planck, and the second prevents biasing due to uncertainties in the noise model.
The overall cosmological parameter tension between the Atacama Cosmology Telescope 2020 (ACT) and Planck 2018 data within the concordance cosmological model is quantified using the suspiciousness statistic to be 2.6$sigma$. Between ACT and the South Pole Telescope (SPT) we find a tension of 2.4$sigma$, and 2.8$sigma$ between ACT and Planck+SPT combined. While it is unclear whether the tension is caused by statistical fluctuations, systematic effects or new physics, caution should be exercised in combining these cosmic microwave background datasets in the context of the $Lambda$CDM standard model of the universe.
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.
We cross-correlate galaxy weak lensing measurements from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) year-one (Y1) data with a cosmic microwave background (CMB) weak lensing map derived from South Pole Telescope (SPT) and Planck data, with an effective overlapping area of 1289 deg$^{2}$. With the combined measurements from four source galaxy redshift bins, we reject the hypothesis of no lensing with a significance of $10.8sigma$. When employing angular scale cuts, this significance is reduced to $6.8sigma$, which remains the highest signal-to-noise measurement of its kind to date. We fit the amplitude of the correlation functions while fixing the cosmological parameters to a fiducial $Lambda$CDM model, finding $A = 0.99 pm 0.17$. We additionally use the correlation function measurements to constrain shear calibration bias, obtaining constraints that are consistent with previous DES analyses. Finally, when performing a cosmological analysis under the $Lambda$CDM model, we obtain the marginalized constraints of $Omega_{rm m}=0.261^{+0.070}_{-0.051}$ and $S_{8}equiv sigma_{8}sqrt{Omega_{rm m}/0.3} = 0.660^{+0.085}_{-0.100}$. These measurements are used in a companion work that presents cosmological constraints from the joint analysis of two-point functions among galaxies, galaxy shears, and CMB lensing using DES, SPT and Planck data.