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Living at the Edge: A Critical Look at the Cosmological Neutrino Mass Bound

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arxiv 2407.13831 v2 pith:RWG4IT4G submitted 2024-07-18 astro-ph.CO hep-exhep-ph

classification astro-ph.COhep-exhep-ph
keywords neutrinoconstraintsplanckcosmologicaldatamassesbounddesi
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

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abstract

Cosmological neutrino mass bounds are becoming increasingly stringent. The latest limit within $\Lambda$CDM from Planck 2018+ACT lensing+DESI is $\sum m_\nu < 0.072\,{\rm eV}$ at 95\% CL, very close to the minimum possible sum of neutrino masses ($\sum m_\nu > 0.06\,{\rm eV}$), hinting at vanishing or even ``negative'' cosmological neutrino masses. In this context, it is urgent to carefully evaluate the origin of these cosmological constraints. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of these results in three ways: i) we check the role of potential anomalies in Planck CMB and DESI BAO data; ii) we compare the results for frequentist and Bayesian techniques, as very close to physical boundaries subtleties in the derivation and interpretation of constraints can arise; iii) we investigate how deviations from $\Lambda$CDM, potentially alleviating these anomalies, can alter the constraints. From a profile likelihood analysis, we derive constraints in agreement at the $\sim 10\%$ level with Bayesian posteriors. We find that the weak preference for negative neutrino masses is mostly present for Planck 18 data, affected by the well-known `lensing anomaly'. It disappears when the new Planck 2020 HiLLiPoP is used, leading to significantly weaker constraints. Additionally, the pull towards negative masses in DESI data stems from the $z=0.7$ bin, which contains a BAO measurement in $\sim 3\sigma$ tension with Planck expectations. Without this bin, and in combination with HiLLiPoP, the bound relaxes to $\sum m_\nu < 0.11\,{\rm eV}$ at 95\% CL. The recent preference for dynamical dark energy alleviates this tension and further weakens the bound. As we are at the dawn of a neutrino mass discovery from cosmology, it will be very exciting to see if this trend is confirmed by future data.

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Forward citations

Cited by 17 Pith papers

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  3. Neutrino mass limits and decaying dark matter: background evolution versus perturbations

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    Decaying dark matter can hide neutrino mass from expansion-history data, but CMB lensing unmasks it and restores ∑mν ≲ 0.079 eV.

  4. Cosmological neutrino mass: a frequentist overview in light of DESI

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    A frequentist profile-likelihood analysis of DESI, Planck, ACT, and eBOSS Lyman-alpha data yields Σmν < 53 meV (95% C.L.) in flat ΛCDM and a CMB-independent bound of 285 meV.

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    Forecasted 1-sigma sensitivity to the sum of neutrino masses is 15 meV for Planck+DESI and 7 meV for CMB-S4+MegaMapper, with the one-loop bispectrum providing 10% and 30% of the constraining power.

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    Bayesian and frequentist analyses show the equal-mass approximation for neutrino masses remains adequate for Planck+DESI data, provided the oscillation-motivated lower bounds on the neutrino mass sum are imposed.

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  17. Integral representation of the neutrino mass-squared differences

    hep-ph 2026-07 reject novelty 2.0 of 10

    The claimed m1 < 0.0023 eV bound is an artifact of assuming the trapezoid error is small enough to force the result; the integral representation gives no independent constraint.

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