Measuring Σ_8 Using DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys Emission-Line Galaxies and Planck CMB Lensing and the Impact of Dust on Parameter Inference

Measuring the growth of structure is a powerful probe for studying the dark sector, especially in light of the σ_8 tension between primary CMB anisotropy and low-redshift surveys. This paper provides a new measurement of the amplitude of the matter power spectrum, σ_8, using galaxy-galaxy and galaxy-CMB lensing power spectra of Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Legacy Imaging Surveys Emission-Line Galaxies and the Planck 2018 CMB lensing map. We create an ELG catalog composed of 24 million galaxies and with a purity of 85%, covering a redshift range 0 < z < 3, with z_ mean = 1.09. We implement several novel systematic corrections, such as jointly modeling the contribution of imaging systematics and photometric redshift uncertainties to the covariance matrix. We also study the impacts of various dust maps on cosmological parameter inference. We measure the cross-power spectra over f_ sky = 0.25 with a signal-to-background ratio of up to 30σ. We find that the choice of dust maps to account for imaging systematics in estimating the ELG overdensity field has a significant impact on the final estimated values of σ_8 and Ω_ M, with far-infrared emission-based dust maps preferring σ_8 to be as low as 0.702 ± 0.030, and stellar-reddening-based dust maps preferring as high as 0.719 ± 0.030. The highest preferred value is at ∼ 3 σ tension with the Planck primary anisotropy results. These findings indicate a need for tomographic analyses at high redshifts and joint modeling of systematics.