• Accepted Paper

Compressed Gaussian likelihood for the Planck low- data

Nanoom Lee

Phys. Rev. D - Accepted 16 September, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/d1t8-3nzs

Abstract

We present a compressed likelihood for the CMB low- E-mode polarization data, constructed from the likelihood which provides a state-of-the-art constraint on the reionization optical depth τ to date. The non-Gaussian form of CMB low- TT and EE likelihoods makes them incompatible with Fisher matrix analyses that require an analytic Gaussian χ2, such as the Fisher-bias formalism and Fisher forecasts. We show that the χ2 of an offset log-normal likelihood takes a Gaussian form in the log-transformed power spectrum amplitudes, and can therefore be used directly in Fisher matrix analyses without any explicit change of variables. Building on this, we compress the likelihood into a small number of piecewise offset log-normal functions and validate it against the full likelihood via MCMC combined with and ACT DR6 data, finding excellent agreement across all ΛCDM parameters and in extended cosmological models. We further demonstrate that Fisher matrix uncertainty estimates from our compressed likelihood agree well with the full MCMC posteriors. We release our compressed likelihood , a lightweight Python package incorporating the compressed low- TT likelihood from previous work, allowing a straightforward incorporation of the Planck CMB low- data into any Gaussian-likelihood-based analysis. The package is publicly available at .

Export citation

Export citation

Choose format for download:

Download Citation

If the author has provided any supplemental materials with this article they will be available upon publication of the version of record.

Sign In to Your Journals Account

Filter

Filter

Article Lookup

Enter a citation