Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: Tomographic cross-correlations between Dark Energy Survey galaxies and CMB lensing from South Pole Telescope + Planck

We measure the cross-correlation between REDMAGIC galaxies selected from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) year 1 data and gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) reconstructed from South Pole Telescope (SPT) and Planck data over 1289  deg^2. When combining measurements across multiple galaxy redshift bins spanning the redshift range of 0.15 < z < 0.90, we reject the hypothesis of no correlation at 19.9σ significance. When removing small-scale data points where thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich signal and nonlinear galaxy bias could potentially bias our results, the detection significance is reduced to 9.9σ. We perform a joint analysis of galaxy-CMB lensing cross-correlations and galaxy clustering to constrain cosmology, finding Ω_m = 0.276^(+0.029)_(−0.030_ and S_8 = σ_8√Ω_m/0.3 = 0.800^(+0.090)_(−0.094). We also perform two alternate analyses aimed at constraining only the growth rate of cosmic structure as a function of redshift, finding consistency with predictions from the concordance ΛCDM model. The measurements presented here are part of a joint cosmological analysis that combines galaxy clustering, galaxy lensing and CMB lensing using data from DES, SPT and Planck.