Cosmology from Planck CMB lensing and DESI DR1 quasar tomography

We present a measurement of the amplitude of matter fluctuations over the redshift range 0.8 ≤ z ≤ 3.5 from the cross correlation of over 1.2 million spectroscopic quasars selected by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) across 7,200 deg2 (∼ 170 quasars/deg2) and Planck PR4 (NPIPE) cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing maps. We perform a tomographic measurement in three bins centered at effective redshifts z=1.44, 2.27 and 2.75, which have ample overlap with the CMB lensing kernel. From a joint fit using the angular clustering of all three redshift bins (auto and cross-spectra), and including an prior from DESI DR1 baryon acoustic oscillations to break the degeneracy, we constrain the amplitude of matter fluctuations in the matter-dominated regime to be and . We provide a growth of structure measurement with the largest spectroscopic quasar sample to date at high redshift, which is ∼ 1.5σ higher than predictions from ΛCDM fits to measurements of the primary CMB from Planck PR4. The cross-correlation between PR4 lensing maps and DESI DR1 quasars is detected with a signal-to-noise ratio of 21.7 and the quasar auto-correlation at 27.2 for the joint analysis of all redshift bins. We combine our measurement with the CMB lensing auto-spectrum from the ground-based Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT DR6) and Planck PR4 to perform a sound-horizon-free measurement of the Hubble constant, yielding through its sensitivity to the matter-radiation equality scale.