Weak lensing of the cosmic microwave background: Power spectrum covariance

We discuss the non-Gaussian contribution to the power spectrum covariance of cosmic microwave background ~CMB! anisotropies resulting through weak gravitational lensing angular deflections and the correlation of deflections with secondary sources of temperature fluctuations generated by the large scale structure, such as the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect and the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect. This additional contribution to the covariance of binned angular power spectrum, beyond the well known cosmic variance and any associated instrumental noise, results from a trispectrum, or a four point correlation function, in temperature anisotropy data. With substantially wide bins in multipole space, the resulting non-Gaussian contribution from lensing to the binned power spectrum variance is insignificant out to multipoles of a few thousand and is not likely to affect the cosmological parameter estimation with acoustic peaks and the damping tail. The non-Gaussian contribution to covariance, however, should be considered when interpreting binned CMB power spectrum measurements at multipoles of a few thousand corresponding to angular scales of few arcminutes and less.