ALBERT

Description: In this work we present a method to extract the signal induced by the integrated Sachs–Wolfe (ISW) effect in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). It makes use of the Linear Covariance-Based filter introduced by Barreiro et al., and combines CMB data with any number of large-scale structure (LSS) surveys and lensing information. It also exploits CMB polarization to reduce cosmic variance. The performance of the method has been thoroughly tested with simulations taking into account the impact of non-ideal conditions such as incomplete sky coverage or the presence of noise. In particular, three galaxy surveys are simulated, whose redshift distributions peak at low ( z ~= 0.3), intermediate ( z ~= 0.6) and high redshift ( z ~= 0.9). The contribution of each of the considered data sets as well as the effect of a mask and noise in the reconstructed ISW map is studied in detail. When combining all the considered data sets (CMB temperature and polarization, the three galaxy surveys and the lensing map), the proposed filter successfully reconstructs a map of the weak ISW signal, finding a perfect correlation with the input signal for the ideal case and around 80 per cent, on average, in the presence of noise and incomplete sky coverage. We find that including CMB polarization improves the correlation between input and reconstruction although only at a small level. Nonetheless, given the weakness of the ISW signal, even modest improvements can be of importance. In particular, in realistic situations, in which less information is available from the LSS tracers, the effect of including polarization is larger. For instance, for the case in which the ISW signal is recovered from CMB plus only one survey, and taking into account the presence of noise and incomplete sky coverage, the improvement in the correlation coefficient can be as large as 10 per cent.