Neutrino masses and cosmology with Lyman-alpha forest power spectrum

By N. Palanque-Delabrouille, C. Yéche, Julien Baur, C. Magneville, G. Rossi, Julien Lesgourgues, A. Borde, É. Burtin, J. Legoff, J. Rich and 2 more. 2015

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We present constraints on neutrino masses, the primordial fluctuation spectrum from inflation, and other parameters of the ΛCDM model, using the one-dimensional Lyα-forest power spectrum measured by [1] from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), complemented by Planck 2015 cosmic microwave background (CMB) data and other cosmological probes. This paper improves on the previous analysis by [2] by using a more powerful set of calibrating hydrodynamical simulations that reduces uncertainties associated with resolution and box size, by adopting a more flexible set of nuisance parameters for describing the evolution of the intergalactic medium, by including additional freedom to account for systematic uncertainties, and by using Planck 2015 constraints in place of Planck 2013. Fitting Lyα data alone leads to cosmological parameters in excellent agreement with the values derived independently from CMB data, except for a weak tension on the scalar index ns. Combining BOSS Lyα with Planck CMB constrains the sum of neutrino masses to ∑ mν < 0.12 eV (95% C.L.) including all identified systematic uncertainties, tighter than our previous limit (0.15 eV) and more robust. Adding Lyα data to CMB data reduces the uncertainties on the optical depth to reionization τ, through the correlation of τ with σ8. Similarly, correlations between cosmological parameters help in constraining the tensor-to-scalar ratio of primordial fluctuations r. The tension on ns can be accommodated by allowing for a running dns/d ln k. Allowing running as a free parameter in the fits does not change the limit on ∑ mν. We discuss possible interpretations of these results in the context of slow-roll inflation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e2b6aefd84d4bd16fcb85eb60ed7e2170aa446a7

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Citations in the corpus

Constraints on neutrino masses from Lyman-alpha forest power spectrum with BOSS and XQ-100 (2017, methodology): “Details on the fit parameters and on the dependance with scale and redshift of the nuisance parameters can be found in [19].”
Baryogenesis from the weak scale to the grand unification scale (2020, methodology): “A combined analysis of CMB and Lyman-alpha data yields the upper bound mtot 0.12 eV (Palanque-Delabrouille et al., 2015), which is consistent21 with recent Planck data combined with lensing and baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) data (Aghanim et al., 2020b).”
Implications of an extended dark energy cosmology with massive neutrinos for cosmological tensions (2018, unknown): “[56] Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille et al.”
Galileon gravity in light of ISW, CMB, BAO and H0 data (2017, result): “ illustrated in the left panel ofFigure 3and on which we comment next. In Galileon gravity cosmologies the data require non-zero neutrino mass values which is in sharp contrast with the result in CDM [33,81]. Specically, in Galileon cosmologies the data rule out m 6= 0 with ˇ5˙signicance; while in C”
Lyman-alpha forests cool warm dark matter (2015, methodology): “Our adaptation of the splicing technique has been successful at reproducing the ‘exact’ spectrum for (100, 1024) and (100, 2048) configurations to within 3% and 2% respectively, as shown in [1].”