Cosmological limits on the neutrino mass sum for beyond-$Λ$CDM models

Kavli Affiliate: Blake Sherwin

| First 5 Authors: Helen Shao, Jahmour J. Givans, Jo Dunkley, Mathew Madhavacheril, Frank Qu

| Summary:

The sum of cosmic neutrino masses can be measured cosmologically, as the
sub-eV particles behave as `hot’ dark matter whose main effect is to suppress
the clustering of matter compared to a universe with the same amount of purely
cold dark matter. Current astronomical data provide an upper limit on $Sigma
m_{nu}$ between 0.07 – 0.12 eV at 95% confidence, depending on the choice of
data. This bound assumes that the cosmological model is $Lambda$CDM, where
dark energy is a cosmological constant, the spatial geometry is flat, and the
primordial fluctuations follow a pure power-law. Here, we update studies on how
the mass limit degrades if we relax these assumptions. To existing data from
the Planck satellite we add new gravitational lensing data from the Atacama
Cosmology Telescope, the new Type Ia Supernova sample from the Pantheon+
survey, and baryonic acoustic oscillation (BAO) measurements from the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey and the Dark Energy Spectrosopic Instrument. We find the
neutrino mass limit is stable to most model extensions, with such extensions
degrading the limit by less than 10%. We find a broadest bound of $Sigma
m_{nu} < 0.19 ~rm{eV}$ at 95% confidence for a model with dynamical dark
energy, although this scenario is not statistically preferred over the simpler
$Lambda$CDM model.

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