Reconstructing the shape of the nonlinear matter power spectrum using CMB lensing and cosmic shear
Phys. Rev. D 112, 063510 – Published 9 September, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/bzrj-76sn
Abstract
We reconstruct the nonlinear matter power spectrum using a joint analysis of gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and lensing of galaxies. This reconstruction is motivated by the tension between early-universe CMB predictions and late-time observables. We use CMB lensing data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope DR6 and cosmic shear data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Y3 release to perform a gravity-only (i.e., no baryonic feedback) fit to in bins of wave number, within a model with a cosmological constant and a cold dark matter component (CDM). We find that with DES cosmic shear data alone, departs from the early-universe CMB prediction on all scales. The joint fit with CMB lensing is consistent on large scales but shows an deviation from scale independence when extending to . We compare our agnostic reconstruction to baryonic feedback models and nonstandard dark matter models: Reasonable variations of both scenarios can recover the shape and amplitude of the suppression. We discuss the advances needed to disentangle these physical effects with a full mapping of .