A bias to CMB lensing measurements from the bispectrum of large-scale structure

The rapidly improving precision of measurements of gravitational lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) also requires a corresponding increase in the precision of theoretical modeling. A commonly made approximation is to model the CMB deflection angle or lensing potential as a Gaussian random field. In this paper, however, we analytically quantify the influence of the non-Gaussianity of large-scale structure lenses, arising from nonlinear structure formation, on CMB lensing measurements. In particular, evaluating the impact of the non-zero bispectrum of large-scale structure on the relevant CMB four-point correlation functions, we find that there is a bias to estimates of the CMB lensing power spectrum. For temperature-based lensing reconstruction with CMB Stage-III and Stage-IV experiments, we find that this lensing power spectrum bias is negative and is of order one percent of the signal. This corresponds to a shift of multiple standard deviations for these upcoming experiments. We caution, however, that our numerical calculation only evaluates two of the largest bias terms and thus only provides an approximate estimate of the full bias. We conclude that further investigation into lensing biases from nonlinear structure formation is required and that these biases should be accounted for in future lensing analyses.Comment: 15+19 pages, 9 figures. Comments welcom

Rotation method for accelerating multiple-spherical Bessel function integrals against a numerical source function

A common problem in cosmology is to integrate the product of two or more spherical Bessel functions (sBFs) with different configuration-space arguments against the power spectrum or its square, weighted by powers of wavenumber. Naively computing them scales as $N_{\rm g}^{p+1}$ with $p$ the number of configuration space arguments and $N_{\rm g}$ the grid size, and they cannot be done with Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs). Here we show that by rewriting the sBFs as sums of products of sine and cosine and then using the product to sum identities, these integrals can then be performed using 1-D FFTs with $N_{\rm g} \log N_{\rm g}$ scaling. This "rotation" method has the potential to accelerate significantly a number of calculations in cosmology, such as perturbation theory predictions of loop integrals, higher order correlation functions, and analytic templates for correlation function covariance matrices. We implement this approach numerically both in a free-standing, publicly-available \textsc{Python} code and within the larger, publicly-available package \texttt{mcfit}. The rotation method evaluated with direct integrations already offers a factor of 6-10$\times$ speed-up over the naive approach in our test cases. Using FFTs, which the rotation method enables, then further improves this to a speed-up of $\sim$$1000-3000\times$ over the naive approach. The rotation method should be useful in light of upcoming large datasets such as DESI or LSST. In analysing these datasets recomputation of these integrals a substantial number of times, for instance to update perturbation theory predictions or covariance matrices as the input linear power spectrum is changed, will be one piece in a Monte Carlo Markov Chain cosmological parameter search: thus the overall savings from our method should be significant