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Extracting the cosmic microwave background (CMB) blackbody temperature power spectrum—which is dominated by the primary CMB signal and the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect—from millimeter-wave sky maps requires cleaning other sky components. In this work, we develop new methods to use large-scale structure (LSS) tracers to remove cosmic infrared background (CIB) and thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) contamination in such measurements. Our methods rely on the fact that LSS tracers are correlated with the CIB and tSZ signals, but their two-point correlations with the CMB and kSZ signals vanish on small scales, thus leaving the CMB blackbody power spectrum unbiased after cleaning. We develop methods analogous to delensing [de-CIB or de-(CIB +tSZ )] to clean CIB and tSZ contaminants using these tracers. We compare these methods to internal linear combination (ILC) methods, including novel approaches that incorporate the tracer maps in the ILC procedure itself, without requiring exact assumptions about the CIB spectral energy distribution. As a concrete example, we use the unWISE galaxy samples as tracers. We provide calculations for a combined Simons Observatory and Planck-like experiment, with our simulated sky model comprising eight frequencies from 93 to 353 GHz. Using unWISE tracers, improvements with our methods over current approaches are already non-negligible: we find improvements up to 20% in the kSZ power spectrum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) when applying the de-CIB method to a tSZ-deprojected ILC map. These gains could be more significant when using additional LSS tracers from current surveys and will become even larger with future LSS surveys, with improvements in the kSZ power spectrum SNR up to 50%. For the total CMB blackbody power spectrum, these improvements stand at 4% and 7%, respectively.
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Cross-correlation of the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich and CMB lensing signals in Planck PR4 data with robust CIB decontamination
We use the full-mission Planck PR4 data to measure the CMB lensing convergence (κ)-thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ, y ) cross-correlation signal, Cℓyκ. This is only the second measurement to date of this signal, following Hill and Spergel [J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys. 02 (2014) 030, 10.1088/1475-7516/2014/02/030]. We perform the measurement using foreground-cleaned tSZ maps built from the PR4 frequency maps via a tailored needlet internal linear combination (NILC) code in our companion paper [F. McCarthy and J. C. Hill, companion paper, Phys. Rev. D 109, 023528 (2024)., 10.1103/PhysRevD.109.023528], in combination with the Planck PR4 κ maps and various systematic-mitigated PR3 κ maps. A serious systematic is the residual cosmic infrared background (CIB) signal in the tSZ map, as the high CIB—κ cross-correlation can significantly bias the inferred tSZ—κ cross-correlation. We mitigate this contamination by deprojecting the CIB in our NILC algorithm, using a moment deprojection approach to avoid leakage due to incorrect modeling of the CIB frequency dependence. We validate this method on mm-wave sky simulations. We fit a theoretical halo model to our measurement, finding a best-fit amplitude of A =0.82 ±0.21 (for the highest signal-to-noise PR4 κ map) or A =0.56 ±0.24 (for a PR3 κ map built from a tSZ-deprojected CMB map), indicating that the data are consistent with our fiducial model within ≈1 -2 σ . Although our error bars are similar to those of the previous measurement [J. C. Hill and D. N. Spergel, J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys. 02 (2014) 030, 10.1088/1475-7516/2014/02/030], our method is significantly more robust to CIB contamination. Our moment-deprojection approach lays the foundation for future measurements of this signal with higher signal-to-noise κ and y maps from ground-based telescopes, which will precisely probe the astrophysics of the intracluster medium of galaxy groups and clusters in the intermediate-mass (M ∼1013- 1014h-1M⊙), high-z (z ≲1.5 , c.f. z ≲0.8 for the tSZ auto-power signal) regime, as well as CIB-decontaminated measurements of tSZ cross-correlations with other large-scale structure probes.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2108536
- PAR ID:
- 10539181
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Physical Society
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Physical Review D
- Volume:
- 109
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2470-0010
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.109.023529
