The reconstructed CMB lensing bispectrum

Abstract

Weak gravitational lensing by the intervening large-scale structure (LSS) of the Universe is the leading non-linear effect on the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The integrated line-of-sight mass that causes the distortion - known as lensing convergence - can be reconstructed from the lensed temperature and polarization anisotropies via estimators quadratic in the CMB modes, and its power spectrum has been measured from multiple CMB experiments. Sourced by the non-linear evolution of structure, the bispectrum of the lensing convergence provides additional information on late-time cosmological evolution complementary to the power spectrum. However, when trying to estimate the summary statistics of the reconstructed lensing convergence, a number of noise-biases are introduced, as previous studies have shown for the power spectrum. Here, we explore for the first time the noise-biases in measuring the bispectrum of the reconstructed lensing convergence. We compute the leading noise-biases in the flat-sky limit and compare our analytical results against simulations, finding excellent agreement. Our results are critical for future attempts to reconstruct the lensing convergence bispectrum with real CMB data.