The effect of neutrinos on the matter distribution as probed by the intergalactic medium

By M. Viel, M. Haehnelt, Volker Springel. 2010

216 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a suite of full hydrodynamical cosmological simulations that quantitatively address the impact of neutrinos on the (mildly non-linear) spatial distribution of matter and in particular on the neutral hydrogen distribution in the Intergalactic Medium (IGM), which is responsible for the intervening Lyman-α absorption in quasar spectra. The free-streaming of neutrinos results in a (non-linear) scale-dependent suppression of power spectrum of the total matter distribution at scales probed by Lyman-α forest data which is larger than the linear theory prediction by about 25 % and strongly redshift dependent. By extracting a set of realistic mock quasar spectra, we quantify the effect of neutrinos on the flux probability distribution function and flux power spectrum. The differences in the matter power spectra translate into a ∼ 2.5% (5%) difference in the flux power spectrum for neutrino masses with Σmν = 0.3 eV (0.6 eV). This rather small effect is difficult to detect from present Lyman-α forest data and nearly perfectly degenerate with the overall amplitude of the matter power spectrum as characterised by σ8. If the results of the numerical simulations are normalized to have the same σ8 in the initial conditions, then neutrinos produce a smaller suppression in the flux power of about 3% (5%) for Σmν = 0.6 eV (1.2 eV) when compared to a simulation without neutrinos. We present constraints on neutrino masses using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey flux power spectrum alone and find an upper limit of Σmν < 0.9 eV (2σ C.L.), comparable to constraints obtained from the cosmic microwave background data or other large scale structure probes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/62d68eb5324cb3e8325b4d48d30d3c37a9c31526

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Citations in the corpus

An efficient implementation of massive neutrinos in non-linear structure formation simulations (2012, methodology): “To do so, we follow the CDM with the Tree-PM N -body code Gadget-3 (Springel 2005; Viel et al. 2010), and compute analytically the linearised neutrino overdensity sourced by the full gravitational potential.”
Massive neutrinos and the non‐linear matter power spectrum (2011, methodology): “Fortunately, the quality of the numerical simulations has advanced to the point where it is possible to model the impact of neutrinos to the level of a few percent, despite the difficulties presented by the large thermal dispersion of light neutrinos (Brandbyge et al. 2008; Viel et al. 2010).”
Accurate halo-model matter power spectra with dark energy, massive neutrinos and modified gravitational forces (2016, background): “The final, and potentially most accurate, option is to include the neutrinos as a separate particle species in the simulation (e.g., Brandbyge et al. 2008; Viel et al. 2010), thus capturing all aspects of their non-linear evolution and the back-reaction of this on the CDM.”
DEMNUni: the clustering of large-scale structures in the presence of massive neutrinos (2015, methodology): “The simulations have been performed using the tree particle mesh-smoothed particle hydrodynamics (TreePM-SPH) code gadget-3, an improved version of the code described in [37], specifically modified in [38] to account for the presence of massive neutrinos.”
Constraint on neutrino masses from SDSS-III/BOSS Lyα forest and other cosmological probes (2014, methodology): “The latest Lyα analyses used Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulations [14] with Bayesian inference.”
Neutrino Mass in Cosmology: Status and Prospects (2011, background): “Figure 3 shows the large-scale matter power spectrum for several massive neutrino cosmologies from the simulations of reference [57], including the aforementioned neutrino thermal velocity dispersion (see also reference [58]).”
Cosmology with massive neutrinos I: towards a realistic modeling of the relation between matter, haloes and galaxies (2013, methodology): “For further details about this method we refer the reader to [30, 35, 37].”
Lyman-alpha forests cool warm dark matter (2015, background): “Stars are a subset of the baryon population, which the code produces whenever a particle with a temperature less than 10(5) K reaches an overdensity with respect to the mean exceeding 1000 (as done for instance in [33]).”
Cosmology and Fundamental Physics with the Euclid Satellite (2012, methodology): “The description of nonlinearities in the matter power spectrum in the presence of massive neutrinos has been addressed in several different ways: [1255, 1028, 1027, 1029] have used perturbation theory, [737] the time-RG flow approach and [228, 227, 229, 1207] different schemes of N -body simulations”
The one-dimensional Lyα forest power spectrum from BOSS (2013, background): “…cosmology through the study of redshift-space distortions and the Alcock-Paczynski test (Alcock & Paczynski 1979; Hui et al. 1999; McDonald & Miralda-Escudé 1999; Croft et al. 2002), the mass of neutrinos (Seljak et al. 2005; Viel et al. 2010), or the BAO peak position (McDonald & Eisenstein 2007).”
hmcode-2020: improved modelling of non-linear cosmological power spectra with baryonic feedback (2020, background): “• Particle neutrinos: neutrinos are explicitly included as a separate particle species in the simulation, with different initial con- ditions compared to CDM and with initial thermal velocities (e.g., Viel et al. 2010).”