UC Irvine

The cross-correlation of cosmic voids with the lensing convergence ( κ ) map of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) fluctuations provides a powerful tool to refine our understanding of the current cosmological model. However, several studies have reported a moderate tension (up to ∼2 σ ) between the lensing imprint of cosmic voids on the observed CMB and the ΛCDM signal predicted by simulations. To address this “lensing-is-low” tension and to obtain new, precise measurements of the signal, we exploit the large DESI Legacy Survey Luminous Red Galaxy (LRG) data set, covering approximately 19 500 deg 2 of the sky and including about 10 million LRGs at z < 1.05. Our ΛCDM template was created using the Buzzard mocks, which we specifically calibrated to match the clustering properties of the observed galaxy sample by exploiting more than one million DESI spectra. We identified our catalogs of 3D voids in the range 0.35 < z < 0.95 and cross-correlated them through a stacking methodology, dividing the sample into bins according to the redshift and λ v values of the voids. For the full void sample, we report a 14 σ detection of the lensing signal, with A κ = 1.016 ± 0.054, which increases to 17 σ when considering the void-in-void ( A κ = 0.944 ± 0.064) and the void-in-cloud ( A κ = 0.975 ± 0.060) populations individually, the highest detection significance for studies of this kind. We observe a full agreement between observations and ΛCDM mocks across all redshift bins, sky regions, and void populations considered. In addition to these findings, our analysis highlights the importance of accurately matching sparseness and redshift error distributions between mocks and observations, as well as the role of λ v in enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio through void population discrimination.