Comment on "Strong Evidence for the Normal Neutrino Hierarchy"

Abstract

In the preprint arxiv:1703.03425 "strong evidence" for the normal neutrino mass ordering is claimed. The authors obtain Bayesian odds of 42:1 in favour of the normal ordering. Their conclusion is based on adopting a flat logarithmic prior for the three neutrino masses. Such an assumption favours a hierarchical spectrum for the masses, which is much easier to accommodate for the normal mass ordering, and hence their prior assumption makes the inverted ordering much less likely a priori. We argue that the claimed "evidence" for normal ordering is almost entirely driven by the adopted prior and not due to the data itself.

arXiv comment2 pages, no figures, comment on arXiv:1703.03425

References in corpus (1)

• A novel approach to quantifying the sensitivity of current and future cosmological datasets to the neutrino mass ordering through Bayesian hierarchical modeling

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