Cosmological neutrino mass constraint from the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey

Abstract

The absolute neutrino mass scale is currently unknown, but can be constrained from cosmology. We use the large-scale structure information from the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey to constrain the sum of neutrino masses. The WiggleZ high redshift star-forming blue galaxy sample is less sensitive to systematic effects from non-linear structure formation, pairwise galaxy velocities, redshift-space distortions, and galaxy bias than previous surveys. Through exhaustive tests using numerical dark-matter simulations of the WiggleZ survey, we demonstrate that at small scales common modelling approaches lead to systematic errors in the recovered cosmological parameters, and we use the simulations to calibrate a new non-linear fitting formula extending to small scales (k = 0.3hMpc). We obtain an upper limit on the sum of neutrino masses of 0.60eV (95% confidence) for WiggleZ+Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. Combining with priors on the Hubble Parameter and the baryon acoustic oscillation scale gives an upper limit of 0.29eV, which is the strongest neutrino mass constraint derived from spectroscopic galaxy redshift surveys.