First detection of the moving lens effect with ACT and DESI LS

TL;DR

This paper reports the first detection of the moving lens effect using ACT and DESI data, providing a new method to probe transverse velocities and large-scale structure growth.

Contribution

Developed a Fourier-space cross-spectrum estimator and applied it to real data, achieving the first observational detection of the moving lens effect.

Findings

Strong evidence for non-zero moving lens signal consistent with halo-model predictions

Fourier-based pipeline effectively mitigates foreground contamination

Results are robust and constitute the first detection of this effect

Abstract

The moving lens effect is a secondary CMB anisotropy induced by the transverse motion of gravitational potentials. We develop a Fourier-space cross-spectrum estimator that retains the scale dependence of the signal, and apply it to the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) DR6 CMB temperature maps and luminous red galaxies from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys. Using the foreground-reduced ACT NILC map, we find strong evidence for a non-zero amplitude of the cross-correlation $b_{\rm ML} = 1.24 \pm 0.26$ ($4.8\sigma$) for the extended sample and $0.93 \pm 0.25$ ($3.7\sigma$) for the main sample, both consistent with the halo-model prediction for the moving lens signal. Our Fourier-based pipeline enforces separation of scales between the reconstructed velocities and the cross-correlation, which we show is essential for foreground mitigation. The residual foreground contamination is expected to be significantly smaller than the signal from both simulations and the multi-frequency analysis presented in this paper. No curl-mode test exceeds $2\sigma$, and the results are robust across analysis variants. They constitute the first detection of the moving lens effect and unlock access to transverse velocities, a new cosmological probe. When combined with the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, this provides a path toward mapping the three-dimensional velocity field of the Universe, opening a new avenue for probing the growth of structure and gravity on large scales.