CMB lensing and primordial non-Gaussianity

We study the effects of gravitational lensing on the estimation of non-Gaussianity from the bispectrum of the CMB temperature anisotropies. We find that the effect of lensing on the bispectrum may qualitatively be described as a smoothing of the acoustic features analogous to the temperature power spectrum. In contrast to previous results, for a Planck-like experiment which is cosmic-variance limited to l(max) = 2000, we find that lensing causes no significant degradation of our ability to constrain the non-Gaussianity amplitude f(NL) for both local and equilateral configurations, provided that the biases due to the cross correlation between the lensing potential and the integrated-Sachs-Wolfe contribution to the CMB temperature are adequately understood. With numerical simulations, we also verify that low-order Taylor approximations to the lensed bispectrum and integrated-Sachs-Wolfe-lensing biases are accurate.