Isotropy analyses of the Planck convergence map

Understand

The presence of matter in the path of relic photons causes distortions in the angular pattern of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature fluctuations, modifying their properties in a slight but measurable way.

• Recently, the Planck Collaboration released the estimated convergence map, an integrated measure of the large-scale matter distribution that produced the weak gravitational lensing (WL) phenomenon observed in Planck CMB data.
• We perform exhaustive analyses of this convergence map calculating the variance in small and large regions of the sky, but excluding the area masked due to galactic contaminations, and compare them with the features expected in the set of simulated convergence maps, also released by the Planck collaboration.
• Our goal is to search for sky directions or regions where the WL imprints anomalous signatures to the variance estimator revealed through a $\chi^2$ analyses at a statistically significant level.