A halo model of extragalactic contamination to CMB lensing, delensing, and cross-correlations

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytic halo model to predict extragalactic contamination biases in CMB lensing measurements, improving understanding of uncertainties in mitigation strategies for small-scale temperature anisotropies.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible analytic framework for predicting biases from foregrounds in CMB lensing, incorporating cosmology and astrophysics variations, and provides a publicly available code.

Findings

Bias shape is insensitive to cosmological and astrophysical parameters.

Bias shape depends on a4_m for low-redshift galaxy cross-correlations.

Resolutions needed in simulations to accurately capture effects.

Abstract

CMB lensing reconstructions are a sensitive probe of the growth of structure across cosmic time and a key tool to sharpen investigations of the very early Universe via delensing. At present, a large fraction of this information is drawn from the temperature anisotropies, which are ultimately also the most informative when reconstructing lenses on arcminute scales and smaller. But extragalactic foreground emission from galaxies and clusters can contaminate these reconstructions, limiting our ability to use information from small-scale temperature anisotropies. We develop analytic predictions of the biases from the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich and cosmic infrared background to CMB lensing auto- and cross-correlations with low-redshift matter tracers, as well as B-mode delensing, based on a halo model for the dominant one- and two-halo contributions to the relevant foreground bi- and tri-spectra. The method is flexible enough to allow variations in cosmology, astrophysical modeling, experimental configurations and analysis choices, thus enabling an improved understanding of the uncertainties involved in current mitigation strategies. We find that the shape of the bias relative to the CMB lensing auto-spectrum signal is remarkably insensitive to changes in cosmological and astrophysical parameter values. On the other hand, the shape appears to depend on $\Omega_m$ for cross-correlations with low-redshift galaxies. We also clarify the ranges of redshifts and masses that simulations need to resolve in order to capture these effects accurately. Our code, CosmoBLENDER, is made publicly available.