Neutrino mass from Cosmology

Abstract

Neutrinos can play an important role in the evolution of the Universe, modifying some of the cosmological observables. In this contribution we summarize the main aspects of cosmological relic neutrinos and we describe how the precision of present cosmological data can be used to learn about neutrino properties, in particular their mass, providing complementary information to beta decay and neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments. We show how the analysis of current cosmological observations, such as the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background or the distribution of large-scale structure, provides an upper bound on the sum of neutrino masses of order 1 eV or less, with very good perspectives from future cosmological measurements which are expected to be sensitive to neutrino masses well into the sub-eV range.

Invited Review article for the Special Issue on Neutrino Physics, 35 pages

References in corpus (13)

• Massive neutrinos and cosmology
• Phenomenology with Massive Neutrinos
• Global status of neutrino oscillation parameters after Neutrino-2012
• Primordial Nucleosynthesis: from precision cosmology to fundamental physics
• Probing cosmological parameters with the CMB: Forecasts from full Monte Carlo simulations
• A robust upper limit on N_eff from BBN, circa 2011
• Neutrino physics from precision cosmology
• Primordial Neutrinos
• Relic density of neutrinos with primordial asymmetries
• Cosmological lepton asymmetry with a nonzero mixing angle θ_{13}
• Constraining massive neutrinos using cosmological 21 cm observations
• Prospects for Constraining Neutrino Mass Using Planck and Lyman-Alpha Forest Data
• Lepton Number-Driven Sterile Neutrino Production in the Early Universe