We present a measurement of the gravitational lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature and polarization fields obtained by cross-correlating the reconstructed convergence signal from the first season of ACTPol data at 146 GHz with
Cosmic Infrared Background (CIB) fluctuations measured using the Planck satellite. Using an overlap area of 206 square degrees, we detect gravitational lensing of the CMB polarization by large-scale structure at a statistical significance of 4.5 sigma. Combining both CMB temperature and polarization data gives a lensing detection at 9.1 sigma significance. A B-mode polarization lensing signal is present with a significance of 3.2 sigma. We also present the first measurement of CMB lensing--CIB correlation at small scales corresponding to l > 2000. Null tests and systematic checks show that our results are not significantly biased by astrophysical or instrumental systematic effects, including Galactic dust. Fitting our measurements to the best-fit lensing-CIB cross power spectrum measured in Planck data, scaled by an amplitude A, gives A=1.02 +0.12/-0.18 (stat.) +/-0.06(syst.), consistent with the Planck results.
We present a measurement of the one-point probability distribution function (PDF) of the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) decrement in the pixel temperature histogram of filtered 148 GHz sky maps from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). The PDF inc
ludes the signal from all galaxy clusters in the map, including objects below the signal-to-noise threshold for individual detection, making it a particularly sensitive probe of the amplitude of matter density perturbations, $sigma_8$. We use a combination of analytic halo model calculations and numerical simulations to compute the theoretical tSZ PDF and its covariance matrix, accounting for all noise sources and including relativistic corrections. From the measured ACT 148 GHz PDF alone, we find $sigma_8 = 0.793 pm 0.018$, with additional systematic errors of $pm 0.017$ due to uncertainty in intracluster medium gas physics and $pm 0.006$ due to uncertainty in infrared point source contamination. Using effectively the same data set, the statistical error here is a factor of two lower than that found in ACTs previous $sigma_8$ determination based solely on the skewness of the tSZ signal. In future temperature maps with higher sensitivity, the tSZ PDF will break the degeneracy between intracluster medium gas physics and cosmological parameters.
We measure the cross-correlation of Atacama Cosmology Telescope CMB lensing convergence maps with quasar maps made from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR8 SDSS-XDQSO photometric catalog. The CMB lensing-quasar cross-power spectrum is detected for the f
irst time at a significance of 3.8 sigma, which directly confirms that the quasar distribution traces the mass distribution at high redshifts z>1. Our detection passes a number of null tests and systematic checks. Using this cross-power spectrum, we measure the amplitude of the linear quasar bias assuming a template for its redshift dependence, and find the amplitude to be consistent with an earlier measurement from clustering; at redshift z ~ 1.4, the peak of the distribution of quasars in our maps, our measurement corresponds to a bias of b = 2.5 +/- 0.6. With the signal-to-noise ratio on CMB lensing measurements likely to improve by an order of magnitude over the next few years, our results demonstrate the potential of CMB lensing cross-correlations to probe astrophysics at high redshifts.
We present a detection of the unnormalized skewness <T^3> induced by the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) effect in filtered Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) 148 GHz cosmic microwave background temperature maps. Contamination due to infrared and radi
o sources is minimized by template subtraction of resolved sources and by constructing a mask using outlying values in the 218 GHz (tSZ-null) ACT maps. We measure <T^3>= -31 +- 6 mu K^3 (measurement error only) or +- 14 mu K^3 (including cosmic variance error) in the filtered ACT data, a 5-sigma detection. We show that the skewness is a sensitive probe of sigma_8, and use analytic calculations and tSZ simulations to obtain cosmological constraints from this measurement. From this signal alone we infer a value of sigma_8= 0.79 +0.03 -0.03 (68 % C.L.) +0.06 -0.06 (95 % C.L.). Our results demonstrate that measurements of non-Gaussianity can be a useful method for characterizing the tSZ effect and extracting the underlying cosmological information.
We report the first detection of the gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background through a measurement of the four-point correlation function in the temperature maps made by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope. We verify our detection by cal
culating the levels of potential contaminants and performing a number of null tests. The resulting convergence power spectrum at 2-degree angular scales measures the amplitude of matter density fluctuations on comoving length scales of around 100 Mpc at redshifts around 0.5 to 3. The measured amplitude of the signal agrees with Lambda Cold Dark Matter cosmology predictions. Since the amplitude of the convergence power spectrum scales as the square of the amplitude of the density fluctuations, the 4-sigma detection of the lensing signal measures the amplitude of density fluctuations to 12%.
We propose a novel bias-free method for reconstructing the power spectrum of the weak lensing deflection field from cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations. The proposed method is in contrast to the standard method of CMB lensing reconstructio
n where a reconstruction bias needs to be subtracted to estimate the lensing power spectrum. This bias depends very sensitively on the modeling of the signal and noise properties of the survey, and a misestimate can lead to significantly inaccurate results. Our method obviates this bias and hence the need to characterize the detailed noise properties of the CMB experiment. We illustrate our method with simulated lensed CMB maps with realistic noise distributions. This bias-free method can also be extended to create much more reliable estimators for other four-point functions in cosmology, such as those appearing in primordial non-Gaussianity estimators.
