Measuring the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect

Context. One of the main challenges of modern cosmology is to understand the nature of the mysterious dark energy that causes the cosmic acceleration. The integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect is sensitive to dark energy, and if detected in a universe where modified gravity and curvature are excluded, presents an independent signature of dark energy. The ISW effect occurs on large scales where cosmic variance is high and where owing to the Galactic confusion we lack large amounts of data in the CMB as well as large-scale structure maps. Moreover, existing methods in the literature often make strong assumptions about the statistics of the underlying fields or estimators. Together these effects can severely limit signal extraction.