Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-28-2005
Publication Title
Physical Review D - Particles and Fields
Department
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Abstract
Weak-lensing distortions of the cosmic-microwave-background (CMB) temperature and polarization patterns can reveal important clues to the intervening large-scale structure. The effect of lensing is to deflect the primary temperature and polarization signal to slightly different locations on the sky. Deflections due to density fluctuations, gradient-type for the gradient of the projected gravitational potential, give a direct measure of the mass distribution. Curl-type deflections can be induced by, for example, a primordial background of gravitational waves from inflation or by second-order effects related to lensing by density perturbations. Whereas gradient-type deflections are expected to dominate, we show that curl-type deflections can provide a useful test of systematics and serve to indicate the presence of confusing secondary and foreground non-Gaussian signals.
DOI
10.1103/PhysRevD.71.123527
Dartmouth Digital Commons Citation
Cooray, Asantha; Kamionkowski, Marc; and Caldwell, Robert R., "Cosmic Shear of the Microwave Background: The Curl Diagnostic" (2005). Dartmouth Scholarship. 1952.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/facoa/1952
