The Impact of Secondary non-Gaussianities in the CMB on Cosmological Parameter Estimation

Joseph Smidt, Shahab Joudaki, Paolo Serra, Alexandre Amblard, Asantha Cooray

Published 2009-09-19, updated 2010-07-13Version 3

We consider corrections to the underlying cosmology due to secondary contributions from weak gravitational lensing, the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect, and the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect contained in the trispectrum. We incorporate these additional contributions to the covariance of a binned angular power spectrum of temperature anisotropies in the analysis of current and prospective data sets. Although recent experiments such as ACBAR and CBI are not particularly sensitive to these additional non-Gaussian effects, the interpretation of Planck and CMBPol anisotropy spectra will require an accounting of non-Gaussian covariance leading to a degradation in cosmological parameter estimates by up to 20% and 30%, respectively.