The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: signs of neutrino mass in current cosmological data sets

Abstract

We investigate the cosmological implications of the latest growth of structure measurement from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) CMASS Data Release 11 with particular focus on the sum of the neutrino masses, m ν . We examine the robustness of the cosmological constraints from the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) scale, the Alcock-Paczynski effect and redshift-space distortions (D V /r s , F AP , f σ 8 ) of Beutler et al. (2013), when introducing a neutrino mass in the power spectrum template. We then discuss how the neutrino mass relaxes discrepancies between the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and other low-redshift measurements within ΛCDM. Combining our cosmological constraints with WMAP9 yields m ν = 0.36 ± 0.14 eV (68% c.l.), which represents a 2.6σ preference for non-zero neutrino mass. The significance can be increased to 3.3σ when including weak lensing results and other BAO constraints, yielding m ν = 0.35 ± 0.10 eV (68% c.l.). However, combining CMASS with Planck data reduces the preference for neutrino mass to ∼ 2σ. When removing the CMB lensing effect in the Planck temperature power spectrum (by marginalising over A L ), we see shifts of ∼ 1σ in σ 8 and Ω m , which have a significant effect on the neutrino mass constraints. In case of CMASS plus Planck without the A L -lensing signal, we find a preference for a neutrino mass of m ν = 0.34 ± 0.14 eV (68% c.l.), in excellent agreement with the WMAP9+CMASS value. The constraint can be tightened to 3.4σ yielding m ν = 0.36 ± 0.10 eV (68% c.l.) when weak lensing data and other BAO constraints are included.

The linear growth of structure in theRh=ctuniverse

“…The χ 2 for this fit is 4.03 with 9 − 1 = 8 degrees of freedom (though with the adoption of two priors). measurements seem to be finding a lower value for this fluctuation amplitude than is expected in ΛCDM (Vikhlinin et al 2009;Planck Collaboration 2014a, 2014bBeutler et al 2014;MacCrann et al 2015).…”

Relieving tensions related to the lensing of the cosmic microwave background temperature power spectra

“…Owing to the fact that their measurement is sensitive to different systematic errors than the CMB, they help break the degeneracies, and are therefore further used in this paper to constrain the cosmological parameters. Here, we have used: the acoustic-scale distance ratio D V (z)/r drag measurements 6 from the 6dF Galaxy Survey at z = 0.1 (Beutler et al 2014), and from BOSS-LowZ at z = 0.32. They have been combined with the BOSS-CMASS anisotropic measurements at z = 0.57, considering both the line of sight and the transverse direction, as described in Anderson et al (2014).…”

The SDSS-IV Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations at Redshift of 0.72 with the DR14 Luminous Red Galaxy Sample

“…In our implementation, we apply the scaling factors in the twodimensional power spectrum (Equation (9)) before computing its multipoles and the associated Hankel transforms (e.g., Beutler et al 2014;Gil-Marín et al 2017). Unknown systematic effects in the survey might create largescale correlations that could contaminate our measurements.…”