Determining Neutrino Mass from the CMB Alone

Preprint
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
  • 17 March 2003
Abstract
Distortions of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature and polarization maps caused by gravitational lensing, observable with high angular resolution and high sensitivity, can be used to measure the neutrino mass.We show how the lensing signature in the CMB breaks a degeneracy between neutrino mass, dark energy equation--of--state and the primordial power spectrum amplitude, allowing for their simultaneous determination. Assuming two massless species and one with mass m we forecast sigma(m) = 0.14 eV from the Planck satellite and sigma(m) = 0.03 eV from observations with twice the angular resolution and \~ 20 times the senstivity. A detection is likely at this higher sensitivity since the observation of atmospheric neutrino oscillations require mass-squared differences greater than about (0.04 eV)^2.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: