Paper detail

CMB lensing forecasts for constraining the primordial perturbations: adding to the CMB temperature and polarization information

We forecast how current ({\planck}) and future ({\prism}) cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments constrain the adiabatic mode and its admixtures with primordial isocurvature modes, using measurements of the reconstructed CMB lensing potential and lensing-induced CMB B-mode polarization anisotropies in combination with the CMB temperature and E-mode polarization anisotropies. We first study the characteristic features of the CMB temperature, polarization and lensing spectra for adiabatic and isocurvature modes. We then consider how lensing-induced B-mode polarization and lensing potential information can improve constraints on an admixture of adiabatic and three correlated isocurvature modes. We find that the CMB lensing spectrum improves constraints on isocurvature modes by at most 10% for the {\planck} and {\prism} experiments, with the limited improvement a result of the low amplitude of isocurvature lensing spectra and cancellations between these spectra rendering them only slightly detectable. There is a larger gain from using the lensing-induced CMB B-mode polarization spectrum, as measured by {\prism}, with constraints on isocurvature mode amplitudes improving by as much as 40% relative to the CMB temperature and E-mode polarization constraints. The addition of both lensing and lensing-induced B-mode polarization information constrains isocurvature mode amplitudes at the few percent level or better, with percent level constraints or better possible in the case of admixtures of the adiabatic mode with one or two correlated isocurvature modes. We investigate the dependence of our results to various assumptions in our analysis, such as the inclusion of dark energy parameters, the CMB temperature-lensing correlation, and the presence of primordial tensor modes, and find that these assumptions do not significantly change our main results.