Improved cosmological constraints on the neutrino mass and lifetime

Abstract

We present cosmological constraints on the sum of neutrino masses as a function of the neutrino lifetime, in a framework in which neutrinos decay into dark radiation after becoming non-relativistic. We find that in this regime the cosmic microwave background (CMB), baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) and (uncalibrated) luminosity distance to supernovae from the Pantheon catalog constrain the sum of neutrino masses $\sum m_{\nu }$ to obey $\sum m_{\nu }<0.42$ eV at (95$\%$ C.L.). While the the bound has improved significantly as compared to the limits on the same scenario from Planck 2015, it still represents a significant relaxation of the constraints as compared to the stable neutrino case. We show that most of the improvement can be traced to the more precise measurements of low-$\ell$ polarization data in Planck 2018, which leads to tighter constraints on ${\tau }_{\mathrm{reio}}$ (and thereby on $A_s$), breaking the degeneracy arising from the effect of (large) neutrino masses on the amplitude of the CMB power spectrum.

arXiv comment24 pages, 8 figures. v2 matches published JHEP version. Comments welcome!

References in corpus (52)

• The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmological analysis of the DR12 galaxy sample
• The Complete Light-curve Sample of Spectroscopically Confirmed Type Ia Supernovae from Pan-STARRS1 and Cosmological Constraints from The Combined Pantheon Sample
• The 6dF Galaxy Survey: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations and the Local Hubble Constant
• The Clustering of the SDSS DR7 Main Galaxy Sample I: A 4 per cent Distance Measure at z=0.15
• Cosmological Perturbation Theory in the Synchronous vs. Conformal Newtonian Gauge
• Cosmological Perturbation Theory in the Synchronous and Conformal Newtonian Gauges
• Cosmology and Fundamental Physics with the Euclid Satellite
• Weighing Neutrinos with Galaxy Surveys
• Unveiling $\nu$ secrets with cosmological data: neutrino masses and mass hierarchy
• Signatures of Relativistic Neutrinos in CMB Anisotropy and Matter Clustering
• DESI and other dark energy experiments in the era of neutrino mass measurements
• Baryon acoustic oscillations from the cross-correlation of Ly$\alpha$ absorption and quasars in eBOSS DR14
• Baryon acoustic oscillations at z = 2.34 from the correlations of Ly$\alpha$ absorption in eBOSS DR14
• A fresh look at linear cosmological constraints on a decaying dark matter component
• Do solar neutrinos decay?
• Phases of New Physics in the CMB
• A First Detection of the Acoustic Oscillation Phase Shift Expected from the Cosmic Neutrino Background
• Neutrinoless Universe
• Updated constraints on non-standard neutrino interactions from Planck
• Neutrino mass in cosmology: status and prospects
• Status of Oscillation plus Decay of Atmospheric and Long-Baseline Neutrinos
• Constraining invisible neutrino decays with the cosmic microwave background
• On the most constraining cosmological neutrino mass bounds
• Neutrino Decays over Cosmological Distances and the Implications for Neutrino Telescopes
• Eliminating the optical depth nuisance from the CMB with 21 cm cosmology
• Neutrino masses and their ordering: Global Data, Priors and Models
• Testing decay of astrophysical neutrinos with incomplete information
• Physical effects involved in the measurements of neutrino masses with future cosmological data
• Invisible Neutrino Decay Resolves IceCube's Track and Cascade Tension
• Cosmological Limits on the Neutrino Mass and Lifetime
• Relaxing Cosmological Neutrino Mass Bounds with Unstable Neutrinos
• Cosmological Constraints on Invisible Neutrino Decays Revisited
• Neutrino decay confronts the SNO data
• Constraints on neutrino decay lifetime using long-baseline charged and neutral current data
• Solar Neutrinos and the Decaying Neutrino Hypothesis
• Constraints on decay plus oscillation solutions of the solar neutrino problem
• Are cosmological neutrinos free-streaming?
• Strong Bayesian Evidence for the Normal Neutrino Hierarchy
• Testing neutrino decay scenarios with IceCube data
• A Global Bayesian Analysis of Neutrino Mass Data
• Invisible neutrino decay in precision cosmology
• Invisible neutrino decay in the light of NOvA and T2K data
• Warm Decaying Dark Matter and the Hubble Tension
• Determining the Neutrino Lifetime from Cosmology
• Visible Decay of Astrophysical Neutrinos at IceCube
• A novel approach to quantifying the sensitivity of current and future cosmological datasets to the neutrino mass ordering through Bayesian hierarchical modeling
• Bayesian evidence for the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ and neutrino masses $m_{\nu }$: Effects of uniform vs logarithmic priors
• Reconstruction of the neutrino mass as a function of redshift
• Cosmological neutrino mass detection: The best probe of neutrino lifetime
• Neutrinos secretly converting to lighter particles to please both KATRIN and the cosmos
• Robustness of cosmic neutrino background detection in the cosmic microwave background
• Precision constraints on radiative neutrino decay with CMB spectral distortion