A Demonstration of Improved Constraints on Primordial Gravitational Waves with Delensing

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that using a lensing template derived from large-scale structure tracers can improve constraints on primordial gravitational waves by reducing sample variance in CMB polarization measurements.

Contribution

It introduces a novel delensing technique combining CMB and large-scale structure data to tighten bounds on the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ in CMB polarization.

Findings

Uncertainty on $r$ reduced by ~10% in simulations.

Real data analysis improves $r$ constraint from 0.090 to 0.082.

First demonstration of $r$ constraint improvement via delensing.

Abstract

We present a constraint on the tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r$, derived from measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization $B$-modes with "delensing," whereby the uncertainty on $r$ contributed by the sample variance of the gravitational lensing $B$-modes is reduced by cross-correlating against a lensing $B$-mode template. This template is constructed by combining an estimate of the polarized CMB with a tracer of the projected large-scale structure. The large-scale-structure tracer used is a map of the cosmic infrared background derived from Planck satellite data, while the polarized CMB map comes from a combination of South Pole Telescope, BICEP/Keck, and Planck data. We expand the BICEP/Keck likelihood analysis framework to accept a lensing template and apply it to the BICEP/Keck data set collected through 2014 using the same parametric foreground modelling as in the previous analysis. From simulations, we find that the uncertainty on $r$ is reduced by $\sim10\%$, from $\sigma(r)$= 0.024 to 0.022, which can be compared with a $\sim26\%$ reduction obtained when using a perfect lensing template. Applying the technique to the real data, the constraint on $r$ is improved from $r_{0.05} < 0.090$ to $r_{0.05} < 0.082$ (95\% C.L.). This is the first demonstration of improvement in an $r$ constraint through delensing.