KiDS-1000: Cross-correlation with Planck cosmic microwave background lensing and intrinsic alignment removal with self-calibration

Context. Galaxy shear and cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing convergence cross-correlations contain additional information on cosmology with respect to auto-correlations. While remaining immune to certain systemic effects, these cross-correlations are nonetheless affected by the galaxy’s intrinsic alignments (IA). These effects may, in fact, be responsible for the reported low lensing amplitude of the galaxy shear × CMB convergence cross-correlations, compared to the standard Planck ΛCDM (cosmological constant and cold dark matter) cosmology predictions. Aims. In this work, we investigate how IA affects the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) galaxy lensing shear and Planck CMB lensing convergence cross-correlation and we compare it to previous treatments, both with and without IA taken into consideration. Methods. We compared the marginalization over IA parameters and the IA self-calibration (SC) method (with additional observables defined only from the source galaxies) to demonstrate that SC can efficiently break the degeneracy between the CMB lensing amplitude, A lens , and the IA amplitude, A IA . We further investigated how different systematics affect the resulting A IA and A lens and we validated our results with the MICE2 simulation. Results. We find that by including the SC method to constrain IA, the information loss due to the degeneracy between CMB lensing and IA is strongly reduced. The best-fit values are A lens = 0.84 −0.22 +0.22 and A IA = 0.60 −1.03 +1.03 , while different angular scale cuts can affect A lens by ∼10%. We show that an appropriate treatment of the boost factor, cosmic magnification, and photometric redshift modeling is important for obtaining the correct IA and cosmological results.