Impact of Next-to-Leading Order Contributions to Cosmic Microwave Background Lensing

In this Letter we study the impact on cosmological parameter estimation, from present and future surveys, due to lensing corrections on cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization anisotropies beyond leading order. In particular, we show how post-Born corrections, large-scale structure effects, and the correction due to the change in the polarization direction between the emission at the source and the detection at the observer are non-negligible in the determination of the polarization spectra. They have to be taken into account for an accurate estimation of cosmological parameters sensitive to or even based on these spectra. We study in detail the impact of higher order lensing on the determination of the tensor-to-scalar ratio r and on the estimation of the effective number of relativistic species N-eff. We find that neglecting higher order lensing terms can lead to misinterpreting these corrections as a primordial tensor-to-scalar ratio of about O(10(-3)). Furthermore, it leads to a shift of the parameter N-eff by nearly 2 sigma considering the level of accuracy aimed by future S4 surveys.