Toward neutrino mass from cosmology without optical depth information

Abstract

With low-redshift probes reaching unprecedented precision, uncertainty of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) optical depth is expected to be the limiting factor for future cosmological neutrino mass constraints. In this paper, we discuss to what extent combinations of CMB lensing and galaxy survey measurements at low redshifts $z\ensuremath{\sim}0.5--5$ will be able to make competitive neutrino mass measurements without relying on any optical depth constraints. We find that the combination of LSST galaxies and CMB-S4 lensing should be able to achieve constraints on the neutrino mass sum of 25 meV without optical depth information, an independent measurement that is competitive with or slightly better than the constraint of 30 meV possible with CMB-S4 and present-day optical depth measurements. These constraints originate in both structure growth probed by cross-correlation tomography over a wide redshift range as well as, most importantly, the shape of the galaxy power spectrum measured over a large volume. We caution that possible complications such as higher-order biasing and systematic errors in the analysis of high-redshift galaxy clustering are only briefly discussed and may be non-negligible. Nevertheless, our results show that new kinds of high-precision neutrino mass measurements at and beyond the present-day optical depth limit may be possible.