Mapping gravitational lensing of the CMB using local likelihoods

Understand

We present a new estimation method for mapping the gravitational lensing potential from observed CMB intensity and polarization fields.

• Our method uses Bayesian techniques to estimate the average curvature of the potential over small local regions.
• These local curvatures are then used to construct an estimate of a low pass filter of the gravitational potential.
• By utilizing Bayesian/likelihood methods one can easily overcome problems with missing and/or non-uniform pixels and problems with partial sky observations (E and B mode mixing, for example).