Removing the ISW-lensing bias from the local-form primordial non-Gaussianity estimation
- Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik, Karl-Schwarzschild Str. 1, 85741 Garching (Germany)
- IUCAA, Post Bag 4, Ganeshkhind, Pune-411007 (India)
The Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect produces a secondary temperature aniso\-tropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), as CMB photons travel through time-varying potentials along the line-of-sight. The main contribution comes from redshifts z∼<2, where dark energy leads to a decay of potentials. As the same photons are gravitationally lensed by these decaying potentials, there exists a high degree of correlation between the ISW effect and CMB lensing, leading to a non-zero three-point correlation (bispectrum) of the observed temperature anisotropy. This ISW-lensing bispectrum, whose shape resembles that of the so-called ''local-form'' primordial bispectrum parametrized by f{sub NL}, is known to be the largest contamination of f{sub NL}. In order to avoid a spurious detection of primordial non-Gaussianity, we need to remove the ISW-lensing bias. In this work, we investigate three debiasing methods: (I) subtraction of an expected, ensemble average of the ISW-lensing bispectrum; (II) subtraction of a measured ISW-lensing bispectrum; and (III) direct subtraction of an estimated ISW signal from an observed temperature map. One may use an estimation of the ISW map from external non-CMB data or that from the CMB data themselves. As the methods II and III are based on fewer assumptions about the nature of dark energy, they are preferred over the method I. While the methods I and II yield unbiased estimates of f{sub NL} with comparable error bars, the method III yields a biased result when the underlying primordial f{sub NL} is non-zero and the ISW map is estimated from a lensing potential reconstructed from the observed temperature map. One of the sources of the bias is a lensing reconstruction noise bias which is independent of f{sub NL} and can be calculated precisely, but other f{sub NL}-dependent terms are difficult to compute reliably. We thus conclude that the method II is the best, model-independent way to remove the ISW-lensing bias of f{sub NL}, enabling us to test the physics of inflation with smaller systematic errors.
- OSTI ID:
- 22282823
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2013, Issue 04; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1475-7516
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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