English

Lensing-like tensions in the Planck legacy release

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2020-04-15 v2

Abstract

We analyze the final release of the Planck satellite data to constrain the gravitational lensing potential in a model-independent manner. The amount of lensing determined from the smoothing of the acoustic peaks in the temperature and polarization power spectra is 2σ\sigma too high when compared with the measurements using the lensing reconstruction and 2.8σ\sigma too high when compared with Λ\LambdaCDM expectation based on the "unlensed" portion of the temperature and polarization power spectra. The largest change from the previous data release is the Λ\LambdaCDM expectation, driven by improved constraints to the optical depth to reionization. The anomaly still is inconsistent with actual gravitational lensing, given that the lensing reconstruction constraints are discrepant independent of the model. Within the context of Λ\LambdaCDM, improvements in its parameter constraints from lensing reconstruction bring this tension to 2.1σ\sigma and from further adding baryon acoustic oscillation and Pantheon supernova data to a marginally higher 2.2σ\sigma. Once these other measurements are included, marginalizing this lensing-like anomaly cannot substantially resolve tensions with low-redshift measurements of H0H_0 and S8S_8 in Λ\LambdaCDM, Λ\LambdaCDM+NeffN_\mathrm{eff} or Λ\LambdaCDM+mν\sum m_\nu; furthermore the artificial strengthening of constraints on mν\sum m_\nu is less than 20%.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1912.06601,
  title  = {Lensing-like tensions in the Planck legacy release},
  author = {Pavel Motloch and Wayne Hu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.06601},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

10 pages, 10 figures, journal accepted version

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:45:25.494Z