Characterizing CMB noise anisotropies from CMB delensing

Undoing the effect of gravitational lensing on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) (“delensing”) is essential in shaping constraints on weak signals limited by lensing effects on the CMB, for example on a background of primordial gravitational waves. Removing these anisotropies induced by large-scale structures from the CMB maps also generally helps our view of the primordial Universe by sharpening the acoustic peaks and the damping tail. However, practical implementations of delensing transfer parts of these anisotropies to the noise maps. This will induce a new large scale “mean-field” bias to any anisotropy estimator applied to the delensed CMB, and this bias directly traces large-scale structures. This paper analytically quantifies this delensed noise mean field and its impact on quadratic and likelihood-based lensing estimators. We show that for Simons-Observatory-like surveys, this mean-field bias can reach 15% in cross-correlation with large-scale structures if unaccounted for. We further demonstrate that this delensed noise mean field can be safely neglected in likelihood-based estimators without compromising the quality of lensing reconstruction or B -mode delensing, provided the resulting lensing map is properly renormalized.