Lensing‐induced Structure of Submillimeter Sources: Implications for the Microwave Background

We consider the effect of lensing by galaxy clusters on the angulardistribution of submillimeter wavelength objects. While lensing does not changethe total flux and number counts of submillimeter sources, it can affect thenumber counts and fluxes of flux-limited samples. Therefore imposing a flux cuton point sources not only reduces the overall Poisson noise, but imprints thecorrelations between lensing clusters on the unresolved flux distribution.Using a simple model, we quantify the lensing anisotropy induced influx-limited samples and compare this to Poisson noise. We find that while thelevel of induced anisotropies on the scale of the cluster angular correlationlength is comparable to Poisson noise for a slowly evolving cluster model, itis negligible for more realistic models of cluster evolution. Thus the removalof point sources is not expected to induce measurable structure in themicrowave or far-infrared backgrounds.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, accepted to Astrophysical Journa