Fast simulations of cosmic large-scale structure with massive neutrinos

Abstract

Accurate cosmological simulations that include the effect of non-linear matter clustering as well as of massive neutrinos are essential for measuring the neutrino mass scale from upcoming galaxy surveys. Typically, Newtonian simulations are employed and the neutrino distribution is sampled with a large number of particles in order to beat down the shot noise. Here we perform very efficient simulations with light massive neutrinos which require virtually no extra cost over matter-only simulations, and furthermore do not require tracer particles for the neutrinos. Instead, we use a weak-field dictionary based on the recently developed Newtonian motion approach, where Newtonian simulations for matter are paired with a linear relativistic Boltzmann code to allow for an absorption of the neutrino evolution into a time-dependent coordinate transformation. For this, only minimal modifications in existing N-body codes are required, which we have explicitly implemented in gevolution and gadget-2. Our fast method determines the non-linear matter power spectrum to permille-level precision when compared against state-of-the-art simulations that have been performed for 0.1 eV ⩽ ∑ mν ⩽ 0.3 eV.