Finding Evidence for Massive Neutrinos using 3D Weak Lensing
arXiv:0801.4565 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.77.103008
Abstract
In this paper we investigate the potential of 3D cosmic shear to constrain massive neutrino parameters. We find that if the total mass is substantial (near the upper limits from LSS, but setting aside the Ly alpha limit for now), then 3D cosmic shear + Planck is very sensitive to neutrino mass and one may expect that a next generation photometric redshift survey could constrain the number of neutrinos N_nu and the sum of their masses m_nu to an accuracy of dN_nu ~ 0.08 and dm_nu ~ 0.03 eV respectively. If in fact the masses are close to zero, then the errors weaken to dN_nu ~ 0.10 and dm_nu~0.07 eV. In either case there is a factor 4 improvement over Planck alone. We use a Bayesian evidence method to predict joint expected evidence for N_nu and m_nu. We find that 3D cosmic shear combined with a Planck prior could provide `substantial' evidence for massive neutrinos and be able to distinguish `decisively' between many competing massive neutrino models. This technique should `decisively' distinguish between models in which there are no massive neutrinos and models in which there are massive neutrinos with |N_nu-3| > 0.35 and m_nu > 0.25 eV. We introduce the notion of marginalised and conditional evidence when considering evidence for individual parameter values within a multi-parameter model.
9 pages, 2 Figures, 2 Tables, submitted to Physical Review D
References in corpus (10)
- Dark energy constraints from cosmic shear power spectra: impact of intrinsic alignments on photometric redshift requirements
- COSMOS: 3D weak lensing and the growth of structure
- On model selection forecasting, Dark Energy and modified gravity
- Self Calibration of Tomographic Weak Lensing for the Physics of Baryons to Constrain Dark Energy
- Neutrino Mass, Dark Energy, and the Linear Growth Factor
- Forecasting the Bayes factor of a future observation
- A combined analysis of 3D Weak Lensing, Lyman-alpha forest and WMAP year three data
- Prospects for Constraining Neutrino Mass Using Planck and Lyman-Alpha Forest Data
- Bayesian Evidence for a Cosmological Constant using new High-Redshift Supernovae Data
- Constraining neutrino masses with the ISW-galaxy correlation function