Cross-correlation between $Planck$ CMB lensing potential and galaxy catalogues from HELP


Abstract in English

We present the first study of cross-correlation between Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) gravitational lensing potential map measured by the $Planck$ satellite and $zgeq 0.8$ galaxies from the photometric redshift catalogues from Herschel Extragalactic Legacy Project (HELP), divided into four sky patches: NGP, Herschel Stripe-82 and two halves of SGP field, covering in total $sim 660$ deg$^{2}$ of the sky. Contrary to previous studies exploiting only the common area between galaxy surveys and CMB lensing data, we improve the cross-correlation measurements using the full available area of the CMB lensing map. We estimate galaxy linear bias parameter, $b$, from joint analysis of cross-power spectrum and galaxy auto-power spectrum using Maximum Likelihood Estimation technique to obtain the value averaged over four fields as $b=2.06_{-0.02}^{+0.02}$, ranging from $1.94_{-0.03}^{+0.04}$ for SGP Part-2 to $3.03_{-0.09}^{+0.10}$ for NGP. We also estimate the amplitude of cross-correlation and find the averaged value to be $A=0.52_{-0.08}^{+0.08}$ spanning from $0.34_{-0.19}^{+0.19}$ for NGP to $0.67_{-0.20}^{+0.21}$ for SGP Part-1 respectively, significantly lower than expected value for the standard cosmological model. We perform several tests on systematic errors that can account for this discrepancy. We find that lower amplitude could be to some extent explained by the lower value of median redshift of the catalogue, however, we do not have any evidence that redshifts are systematically overestimated.

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