Comparison of delensing methodologies and assessment of the delensing capabilities of future experiments

Abstract

Most of the CMB experiments proposed for the next generation aim to detect the Primordial Gravitational Wave Background (PGWB). The fulfillment of this objective depends on our capacity to separate Galactic foreground emissions and to delens the secondary B-mode component induced by weak gravitational lensing. Focusing on the latter of these efforts, in this work we briefly review the basic aspects of lensing, and exhaustively compare the performance of current delensing methodologies and implementations within the Born approximation as a preparation for the analysis of the data to come in the following years. Two of the main conclusions that can be drawn from our study are that, for next-generation experiments, delensing efficiency will still be limited by the quality of the data itself rather than by the limitations of current delensing methodologies, and that template delensing within the antilensing approximation will be the optimal (balancing accuracy and computational cost) technique to employ. We then evaluate the delensing capabilities of future experiments (like the Simons Observatory, the CMB Stage-IV, or the LiteBIRD and PICO satellites) by applying that methodology onto numerical simulations of the typical CMB and lensing potential reconstructions that they are expected to produce, and quantify how internal and external delensing will help them to improve their sensitivity to detect the PGWB. We also consider the benefits that a joint analysis of their data would provide.