Extragalactic foregrounds are known to generate significant biases in temperature-based cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing reconstruction. Several techniques, which include “source hardening” and “shear-only estimators” have been proposed to mitigate contamination and have been shown to be very effective at reducing foreground-induced biases. Here we extend both techniques to polarization, which will be an essential component of CMB lensing reconstruction for future experiments, and investigate the “large-lens” limit analytically to gain insight on the origin and scaling of foreground biases, as well as the sensitivity to their profiles. Using simulations of polarized point sources, we estimate the expected bias to both Simons Observatory and CMB-S4 like (polarization-based) lensing reconstruction, finding that biases to the former are minuscule while those to the latter are potentially non-negligible at small scales ($L\sim 1000–2000$). In particular, we show that for a CMB-S4 like experiment, an optimal linear combination of point-source hardened estimators can reduce the (point-source induced) bias to the CMB lensing power spectrum by up to two orders of magnitude, at a $\sim 4\%$ noise cost relative to the global minimum variance estimator.

• Received 9 November 2022
• Accepted 19 December 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.107.023504