A Large Sky Simulation of the Gravitational Lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background

Understand

Large scale structure deflects cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons.

• Since large angular scales in the large scale structure contribute significantly to the gravitational lensing effect, a realistic simulation of CMB lensing requires a sufficiently large sky area.
• We describe simulations that include these effects, and present both effective and multiple plane ray-tracing versions of the algorithm, which employs spherical harmonic space and does not use the flat sky approximation.
• We simulate lensed CMB maps with an angular resolution of ~0.9 arcmin.