Li, Chao and Cooray, Asantha (2006) Weak lensing of the cosmic microwave background by foreground gravitational waves. Physical Review D, 74 (2). Art. No. 023521. ISSN 0556-2821. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:LICprd06
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Weak lensing distortion of the background cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization patterns by the foreground density fluctuations is well studied in the literature. We discuss the gravitational lensing modification to CMB anisotropies and polarization by a stochastic background of primordial gravitational waves between us and the last scattering surface. While density fluctuations perturb CMB photons via gradient-type deflections only, foreground gravitational waves distort CMB anisotropies via both gradient- and curl-type displacements. The latter is a rotation of background images, while the former is related to the lensing convergence. For a primordial background of inflationary gravitational waves, with an amplitude corresponding to a tensor-to-scalar ratio below the current upper limit of ~0.3, the resulting modifications to the angular power spectra of CMB temperature anisotropy and polarization are below the cosmic variance limit. At tens of arcminute angular scales and below, these corrections, however, are above the level at which systematics must be controlled in all-sky anisotropy and polarization maps with no instrumental noise and other secondary and foreground signals.
|Additional Information:||©2006 The American Physical Society. Received: 14 April 2006; published: 19 July 2006. We thank A. Stebbins and J. Pritchard for useful discussions. This work was supported in part by DOE at UC Irvine (A.C.) and by the Moore Foundation at Caltech (C.L.).|
|Subject Keywords:||LARGE-SCALE STRUCTURE; GRAVITY-WAVES; POWER SPECTRUM; POLARIZATION|
|Usage Policy:||No commercial reproduction, distribution, display or performance rights in this work are provided.|
|Deposited By:||Lindsay Cleary|
|Deposited On:||02 Nov 2006|
|Last Modified:||26 Dec 2012 09:15|
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