New Neutrino Mass Bounds From SDSS-Iii Data Release 8 Photometric Luminous Galaxies

Abstract

We present neutrino mass bounds using 900,000 luminous galaxies with photometric redshifts measured from Sloan Digital Sky Survey III Data Release Eight (SDSS DR8). The galaxies have photometric redshifts between z = 0.45 and z = 0.65, and cover 10,000 square degrees and thus probe a volume of 3h −3 Gpc 3 , enabling tight constraints to be derived on the amount of dark matter in the form of massive neutrinos. A new bound on the sum of neutrino masses m ν < 0.26 eV, at 95% confidence level (CL), is obtained after combining our sample of galaxies, which we call "CMASS", with WMAP 7 year Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data and the most recent measurement of the Hubble parameter from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This constraint is obtained with a conservative multipole range choice of 30 < < 200 in order to minimize non-linearities, and a free bias parameter in each of the four redshift bins. We study the impact of assuming this linear galaxy bias model using mock catalogs, and find that this model causes a small (∼ 1 − 1.5σ) bias in Ω DM h 2 . For this reason, we also quote neutrino bounds based on a conservative galaxy bias model containing additional, shot noise-like free parameters. In this conservative case, the bounds are significantly weakened, e.g. m ν < 0.36 eV (95% confidence level) for WMAP+HST+CMASS ( max = 200). We also study the dependence of the neutrino bound on multipole range ( max = 150 vs max = 200) and on which combination of data sets is included as a prior. The addition of supernova and/or Baryon Acoustic Oscillation data does not significantly improve the neutrino mass bound once the HST prior is included.A companion paper (Ho et al. 2012) describes the construction of the angular power spectra in detail and derives constraints on a general cosmological model, including the dark energy equation of state w and the spatial curvature Ω K , while a second companion paper Seo et al. (2012) presents a measurement of the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations from the same data set. All three works are based on the catalog by Ross et al. (2011).

Flavour models for TM1lepton mixing

“…1 (where the best-fit value for was used). (B13) This is a value which violates a recent cosmological bound [34] but fits nicely with a different one [35].…”

“…Indeed, once we specify a 1-4 and solve eqs. (34) by fixing the relative magnitudes v 1 and v 2 through eq. (35), it would take extreme finetuning for a solution of eqs.…”

Lensing and time-delay contributions to galaxy correlations

“…The third term (αβ term) in (8) thus describes geometry and also relativistic corrections [see (22)]. The standard flat-sky (Kaiser) analysis includes only the first two terms of (8). In the Newtonian wide-angle generalization of the Kaiser case, the third term of (8) appears, with the Newtonian approximation α nwt of α [23]:…”

“…[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]), using different techniques. The need to include geometrical and lightcone effects in the theoretical modeling has been long recognised (see the seminal works [16][17][18][19][20][21]).…”

Probing small-scale cosmological fluctuations with the 21 cm forest: Effects of neutrino mass, running spectral index, and warm dark matter

“…Cosmological observations have already placed relatively tight constraints on neutrino masses. For example, upper bounds of m ν < 0.17 eV and m ν < 0.26 eV have been placed from observations of the Lyα forest and SDSS-III, respectively [42], while recent Planck results give m ν < 0.66 eV from the CMB alone [2]. To illustrate the effect of neutrino mass, we consider three cases, m ν = 0.1, 0.5 and 1.0 eV.…”