L. Van Waerbeke et al., Lensing effect on the relative orientation between the cosmic microwave background ellipticities and the distant galaxies, ASTROPHYS J, 540(1), 2000, pp. 14-19
The low-redshift structures of the universe act as lenses in a similar way
on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) light and on the distant galaxies
(say at redshift about unity). As a consequence, the CMB temperature distor
tions are expected to be statistically correlated with the galaxy shear, ex
hibiting a nonuniform distribution of the relative angle between the CMB an
d the galactic ellipticities. Investigating this effect, we find that its a
mplitude is as high as a 10% excess of alignment between CMB and the galact
ic ellipticities relative to the uniform distribution. The relatively high
signal-to-noise ratio we found should make possible a detection with the pl
anned CMB data sets, provided that a galaxy survey followup can be done on
a sufficiently large area. It would provide a complementary bias-independen
t constraint on the cosmological parameters.