The halo mass of optically-luminous quasars at z=1-2 measured via gravitational deflection of the cosmic microwave background

Understand

We measure the average deflection of cosmic microwave background photons by quasars at $\langle z \rangle =1.7$.

• Our sample is selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to cover the redshift range $0.9\leq z\leq2.2$ with absolute i-band magnitudes of $M_i\leq-24$ (K-corrected to z=2).
• A stack of nearly 200,000 targets reveals an 8$\sigma$ detection of Planck's estimate of the lensing convergence towards the quasars.
• We fit the signal with a model comprising a Navarro-Frenk-White density profile and a 2-halo term accounting for correlated large scale structure, which dominates the observed signal.