Lensing covariance on cut sky and SPT-Planck lensing tensions

Abstract

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 $3.0\sigma$ or $2.1\sigma$ 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 $3.5\sigma$ or $2.5\sigma$. 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.

17 pages, 14 figures

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Power Spectra at 98 and 150 GHz
• Constraints on Cosmological Parameters from the 500 deg${}^2$ SPTpol Lensing Power Spectrum
• Constraints on $\Lambda$CDM Extensions from the SPT-3G 2018 $EE$ and $TE$ Power Spectra
• Quantifying concordance of correlated cosmological data sets
• Lensing-like tensions in the Planck legacy release
• Baryonic feedback biases on fundamental physics from lensed CMB power spectra
• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Delensed Power Spectra and Parameters
• Analytic Calculation of Covariance between Cosmological Parameters from Correlated Data Sets, with an Application to SPTpol
• Accounting for Correlations When Fitting Extra Cosmological Parameters