Presence Of Massive Neutrinos Research Articles

Elucidating the impact of massive neutrinos on halo assembly bias

ABSTRACT Massive neutrinos have non-negligible impact on the formation of large-scale structures. We investigate the impact of massive neutrinos on the halo assembly bias effect, measured by the relative halo bias $\hat{b}$ as a function of the curvature of the initial density peak $\hat{s}$, neutrino excess ϵν, or halo concentration $\hat{c}$, using a large suite of ΣMν = 0.0 and 0.4 eV simulations with the same initial conditions. By tracing dark matter haloes back to their initial density peaks, we construct a catalogue of halo ‘twins’ that collapsed from the same peaks but evolved separately with and without massive neutrinos, thereby isolating any effect of neutrinos on halo formation. We detect a 2 per cent weakening of the halo assembly bias as measured by $\hat{b}(\epsilon _\nu)$ in the presence of massive neutrinos. As there exists a significant correlation between $\hat{s}$ and ϵν (rcc = 0.319), the impact of neutrinos persists at a reduced level (0.1 per cent) in the halo assembly bias measured by $\hat{b}(\hat{s})$. However, we do not detect any neutrino-induced impact on $\hat{b}(\hat{c})$, consistent with earlier studies and the lack of correlation between $\hat{c}$ and ϵν (rcc = 0.087). We also discover an analogous assembly bias effect for the ‘neutrino haloes’, whose concentrations are anticorrelated with the large-scale clustering of neutrinos.

DEMNUni: cross-correlating the nonlinear ISWRS effect with CMB-lensing and galaxies in the presence of massive neutrinos

We present an analytical modelling of the angular cross-correlations between the Integrated Sachs Wolfe-Rees Sciama (ISWRS) effect and large-scale structure tracers in the presence of massive neutrinos. Our method has been validated against large N-body simulations with a massive neutrino particle component, namely the DEMNUni suite. We investigate the impact of different neutrino masses on the cross-correlations between the ISWRS effect and both the galaxy clustering and the lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). We also test the ability of current nonlinear matter power spectrum modellings to reproduce neutrino effects in such cross-correlations. We show that the multipole position of a characteristic sign inversion in the cross-spectra, due to nonlinear effects, is strongly related to the total neutrino mass Mν and depends almost linearly on it. While these nonlinear cross-correlation signals may not be able alone to constrain the neutrino mass, our approach paves the way to the detection of such cross-spectra on small scales for their exploitation in combination with main probes from future galaxy surveys and CMB experiments.

FkPT: constraining scale-dependent modified gravity with the full-shape galaxy power spectrum

Modified gravity models with scale-dependent linear growth typically exhibit an enhancement in the power spectrum beyond a certain scale. The conventional methods for extracting cosmological information usually involve inferring modified gravity effects via Redshift Space Distortions (RSD), particularly through the time evolution of fσ 8. However, classical galaxy RSD clustering analyses encounter difficulties in accurately capturing the spectrum's enhanced power, which is better obtained from the broad-band power spectrum. In this sense, full-shape analyses aim to consider survey data using comprehensive and precise models of the whole power spectrum. Yet, a major challenge in this approach is the slow computation of non-linear loop integrals for scale-dependent modified gravity, precluding the estimation of cosmological parameters using Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. Based on recent studies, in this work we develop a perturbation theory tailored for Modified Gravity, or analogous scenarios introducing additional scales, such as in the presence of massive neutrinos. Our approach only needs the calculation of the scale-dependent growth rate f(k,t) and the limit of the perturbative kernels at large scales. We called this approximate technique as fk-Perturbation Theory and implemented it into the code fkpt, capable of computing the redshift space galaxy power spectrum in a fraction of a second. We validate our modeling and code with the f(R) theory MG-GLAM and General Relativity NSeries sets of simulations. The code is available at https://github.com/alejandroaviles/fkpt.

Compressing the Cosmological Information in One-dimensional Correlations of the Lyman-α Forest

Observations of the Lyman-α forest from spectroscopic surveys such as the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey or its extension, eBOSS, or the ongoing Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey offer a unique window to study the growth of structure on megaparsec scales. Interpretation of these measurements is a complicated task, requiring hydrodynamical simulations to model and marginalize over the thermal and ionization state of the intergalactic medium. This complexity has limited the use of Lyα clustering measurements in joint cosmological analyses. In this work we show that the cosmological information content of the one-dimensional power spectrum (P 1D) of the Lyman-α forest can be compressed into a simple two-parameter likelihood without any significant loss of constraining power. We simulate P 1D measurements from DESI using hydrodynamical simulations and show that the compressed likelihood is model independent and lossless, recovering unbiased results even in the presence of massive neutrinos or running of the primordial power spectrum.

Signature of Massive Neutrinos from the Clustering of Critical Points. I. Density-threshold-based Analysis in Configuration Space

Critical points represent a subset of special points tracing cosmological structures, carrying remarkable topological properties. They thus offer a richer high-level description of the multiscale cosmic web, being more robust to systematic effects. For the first time, we characterize here their clustering statistics in massive neutrino cosmologies, including cross-correlations, and quantify their simultaneous imprints on the corresponding web constituents—i.e., halos, filaments, walls, and voids—for a series of rarity levels. Our first analysis is centered on a density-threshold-based approach in configuration space. In particular, we show that the presence of massive neutrinos does affect the baryon acoustic oscillation peak amplitudes of all of the critical point correlation functions above/below the rarity threshold, as well as the positions of their correspondent inflection points at large scales: departures from analogous measurements carried out in the baseline massless neutrino scenario can reach up to ∼7% in autocorrelations and ∼9% in cross-correlations at z = 0 when M ν = 0.1 eV and are more pronounced for higher neutrino mass values. In turn, these combined multiscale effects can be used as a novel technique to set upper limits on the summed neutrino mass and infer the type of hierarchy. Our study is particularly relevant for ongoing and future large-volume redshift surveys such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which will provide unique data sets suitable for establishing competitive neutrino mass constraints.

DEMNUni: comparing nonlinear power spectra prescriptions in the presence of massive neutrinos and dynamical dark energy

We provide an accurate comparison, against large cosmological N-body simulations, of different prescriptions for modelling nonlinear matter power spectra in the presence of massive neutrinos and dynamical dark energy. We test the current most widely used approaches: fitting functions (HALOFIT and HMcode), the halo-model reaction (ReACT) and emulators (baccoemu and EuclidEmulator2). Focussing on redshifts z ≤ 2 and scales k ≲ 1 h/Mpc (where the simulation mass resolution provides ∼ 1% accuracy), we find that HMcode and ReACT considerably improve over the HALOFIT prescriptions of Smith and Takahashi (both combined with the Bird correction), with an overall agreement of 2% for all the cosmological scenarios considered. Concerning emulators, we find that, especially at low redshifts, EuclidEmulator2 remarkably agrees with the simulated spectra at ≲ 1% level in scenarios with dynamical dark energy and massless neutrinos, reaching a maximum difference of ∼ 2% at z = 2. baccoemu has a similar behaviour as EuclidEmulator2, except for a couple of dark energy models. In cosmologies with massive neutrinos, at z = 0 all the nonlinear prescriptions improve their agreement with respect to the massless neutrino case, except for the Bird and TakaBird models which, however, are not tailored to w 0–wa models. At z > 0 we do not find a similar improvement when including massive neutrinos, probably due to the lower impact of neutrino free-streaming at higher redshifts; rather at z = 2 EuclidEmulator2 exceeds 2% agreement for some dark energy equation of state. When considering ratios between the matter power spectrum computed in a given cosmological model and its ΛCDM counterpart, all the tested prescriptions agree with simulated data, at sub-percent or percent level, depending on z. Finally, we also test how nonlinear prescriptions compare against simulations when computing cosmic shear and angular galaxy clustering spectra. For the former, we find a 2–3% agreement for HMcode, baccoemu, EuclidEmulator2 and ReACT; for the latter, due to the minimum stellar mass of the simulated galaxies, shot noise highly affects the signal and makes the discrepancies as high as 5%.

Fast computation of non-linear power spectrum in cosmologies with massive neutrinos

We compute 1-loop corrections to the redshift space galaxy power spectrum in cosmologies containing additional scales, and hence kernels different from Einstein-de Sitter (EdS). Specifically, our method is tailored for cosmologies in the presence of massive neutrinos and some modified gravity models; in this article we concentrate on the former case. The perturbative kernels have contributions that we notice appear either from the logarithmic growth rate f(k,t), which is scale-dependent because of the neutrino free-streaming, or from the failure of the commonly used approximation f 2 = Ω m . The latter contributions make the computation of loop corrections quite slow, precluding full-shape analyses for parameter estimation. However, we identify that the dominant pieces of the kernels come from the growth factor, allowing us to simplify the kernels but retaining the characteristic free-streaming scale introduced by the neutrinos' mass. Moreover, with this simplification one can exploit FFTLog methods to speed up the computations even more. We validate our analytical modeling and numerical method with halo catalogs extracted from the Quijote simulations finding good agreement with the, a priori, known cosmological parameters. We make public our Python code FOLPSν to compute the redshift space power spectrum in a fraction of second. Code available at https://github.com/henoriega/FOLPS-nu.

The Splashback Mass Function in the Presence of Massive Neutrinos

We present a complementary methodology to constrain the total neutrino mass, ∑m ν , based on the diffusion coefficient of the splashback mass function of dark matter halos. Analyzing the snapshot data from the Massive Neutrino Simulations, we numerically obtain the number densities of distinct halos identified via the SPARTA code as a function of their splashback masses at various redshifts for two different cases of ∑m ν = 0.0 and 0.1 eV. Then, we fit the numerical results to the recently developed analytic formula characterized by the diffusion coefficient that quantifies the degree of ambiguity in the identification of the splashback boundaries. Our analysis confirms that the analytic formula works excellently even in the presence of neutrinos and that the decrement of its diffusion coefficient with redshift is well described by a linear fit, B(z − z c ), in the redshift range of 0.2 ≤ z ≤ 2. It turns out that the massive neutrino case yields a significantly lower value of B and a substantially higher value of z c than the massless neutrino case, which indicates that the higher the masses that neutrinos have, the more severely the splashback boundaries become disturbed by the surroundings. Given our result, we conclude that the total neutrino mass can in principle be constrained by measuring how rapidly the diffusion coefficient of the splashback mass function diminishes with redshifts at z ≥ 0.2. We also discuss the anomalous behavior of the diffusion coefficient found at lower redshifts for both of the ∑m ν cases, and ascribe it to the fundamental limitation of the SPARTA code at z ≤ 0.13.

Clustering in massive neutrino cosmologies via Eulerian Perturbation Theory

We introduce an Eulerian Perturbation Theory to study the clustering of tracers for cosmologies in the presence of massive neutrinos. Our approach is based on mapping recently-obtained Lagrangian Perturbation Theory results to the Eulerian framework. We add Effective Field Theory counterterms, IR-resummations and a biasing scheme to compute the one-loop redshift-space power spectrum. To assess our predictions, we compare the power spectrum multipoles against synthetic halo catalogues from the QUIJOTE simulations, finding excellent agreement on scales k ≲ 0.25 h Mpc-1. One can obtain the same fitting accuracy using higher wave-numbers, but then the theory fails to give a correct estimation of the linear bias parameter. We further discuss the implications for the tree-level bispectrum. Finally, calculating loop corrections is computationally costly, hence we derive an accurate approximation wherein we retain only the main features of the kernels, as produced by changes to the growth rate. As a result, we show how FFTLog methods can be used to further accelerate the loop computations with these reduced kernels.

Generalized Boltzmann hierarchy for massive neutrinos in cosmology

Boltzmann solvers are an important tool for the computation of cosmological observables in the linear regime. In the presence of massive neutrinos, they involve solving the Boltzmann equation followed by an integration in momentum space to arrive at the desired fluid properties, a procedure which is known to be computationally slow. In this work we introduce the so-called generalized Boltzmann hierarchy (GBH) for massive neutrinos in cosmology, an alternative to the usual Boltzmann hierarchy, where the momentum dependence is integrated out leaving us with a two-parameter infinite set of ordinary differential equations. Along with the usual expansion in multipoles, there is now also an expansion in higher velocity weight integrals of the distribution function. Using a toy code, we show that the GBH produces the density contrast neutrino transfer function to a $\lesssim 0.5\%$ accuracy at both large and intermediate scales compared to the neutrino free-streaming scale, thus providing a proof-of-principle for the GBH. We comment on the implementation of the GBH in a state of the art Boltzmann solver.

Cosmic voids in modified gravity models with massive neutrinos

ABSTRACT Cosmic voids are progressively emerging as a new viable cosmological probe. Their abundance and density profiles are sensitive to modifications of gravity, as well as to dark energy and neutrinos. The main goal of this work is to investigate the possibility of exploiting cosmic void statistics to disentangle the degeneracies resulting from a proper combination of f(R) modified gravity and neutrino mass. We use N-body simulations to analyse the density profiles and size function of voids traced by both dark matter particles and haloes. We find clear evidence of the enhancement of gravity in f(R) cosmologies in the void density profiles at z = 1. However, these effects can be almost completely overridden by the presence of massive neutrinos because of their thermal free streaming. Despite the limited volume of the analysed simulations does not allow us to achieve a statistically relevant abundance of voids larger than 40 Mpc h−1, we find that the void size function at high redshifts and for large voids is potentially an effective probe to disentangle these degenerate cosmological models, which is key in the prospective of the upcoming wide-field redshift surveys.

Spoon or slide? The non-linear matter power spectrum in the presence of massive neutrinos

Numerical simulations of massive neutrino cosmologies consistently find a spoon-like feature in the non-linear matter power spectrum ratios of cosmological models that differ only in the neutrino mass fraction fN. Typically, the ratio approaches unity at low wave numbers k, decreases by ∼ 10 fN at k ∼ 1 h/Mpc, and turns up again at large k. Using the halo model of large-scale structure, we show that this spoon feature originates in the transition from the two-halo power spectrum to the one-halo power spectrum. The former's sensitivity to fN rises with k, while that of the latter decreases with k. The presence of this spoon feature is robust with respect to different choices of the halo mass function and the halo density profile, and does not require any parameter tuning within the halo model. We demonstrate that a standard halo model calculation is already able to predict the depth, width, and position of this spoon as well as its evolution with redshift z with remarkable accuracy. Predictions at z ≳ 1 can be further improved using non-linear perturbative inputs.

A Lagrangian perturbation theory in the presence of massive neutrinos

We develop a Lagrangian Perturbation Theory (LPT) framework to study the clustering of cold dark matter (CDM) in cosmologies with massive neutrinos. We follow the trajectories of CDM particles with Lagrangian displacements fields up to third order in perturbation theory. Once the neutrinos become non-relativistic, their density fluctuations are modeled as being proportional to the CDM density fluctuations, with a scale-dependent proportionality factor. This yields a gravitational back-reaction that introduces additional scales to the linear growth function, which is accounted for in the higher order LPT kernels. Through non-linear mappings from Eulerian to Lagrangian frames, we ensure that our theory has a well behaved large scale behavior free of unwanted UV divergences, which are common when neutrino and CDM densities are not treated on an equal footing, and in resummation schemes that manifestly break Galilean invariance. We use our theory to construct correlation functions for both the underlying matter field, as well as for biased tracers using Convolution-LPT. Redshift-space distortions effects are modeled using the Gaussian Streaming Model. When comparing our analytical results to simulated data from the \ extsc{Quijote} simulation suite, we find good accuracy down to r=20 Mpc h−1 at redshift z=0.5, for the real space and redshift space monopole particle correlation functions with no free parameters. The same accuracy is reached for the redshift space quadrupole if we additionally consider an effective field theory parameter that shifts the pairwise velocity dispersion. For modeling the correlation functions of tracers we adopt a simple Lagrangian biasing scheme with only density and curvature operators, which we find sufficient to reach down to r=20 Mpc h−1 when comparing to simulated halos.

Constraining the Neutrino Mass with the Drifting Coefficient of the Field Cluster Mass Function

Abstract A new diagnostics to break the degeneracy between the total neutrino mass (M ν ) and the primordial power spectrum amplitude (σ 8) using the drifting coefficient of the field cluster mass function is presented. Analyzing the data from the Cosmological Massive Neutrino Simulations, we first determine the numerical mass functions of the field clusters at various redshifts. Then, we compare the numerical results with the analytical model characterized by a single parameter called the drifting coefficient, which measures the drifts of the collapse density threshold, δ c, from the Einstein–de Sitter spherical value, δ sc, at a given mass scale. It is found that the analytic model for the field cluster mass function is found to work excellently even in the presence of massive neutrinos, and that its drifting coefficient evolves differently in the cosmologies with different values of M ν . At low redshifts (z ≲ 0.3) the more massive neutrinos drift δ c further from δ sc, while the opposite trend is found at higher redshifts (z ≳ 0.3). Speculating that this distinct redshift-dependent effect of massive neutrinos on the drifting coefficient of the field cluster mass function might help break the σ 8–M ν degeneracy, we also show that the sensitivity of this new diagnostics to M ν is high enough to discriminate the case of M ν = 0.1 eV from that of massless neutrinos.

Massive neutrinos and degeneracies in Lyman-alpha forest simulations

Using a suite of hydrodynamical simulations with cold dark matter, baryons, and neutrinos, we present a detailed study of the effect of massive neutrinos on the 1-D and 3-D flux power spectra of the Lyman-α (Lyα) forest. The presence of massive neutrinos in cosmology induces a scale- and time-dependent suppression of structure formation that is strongest on small scales. Measuring this suppression is a key method for inferring neutrino masses from cosmological data, and is one of the main goals of ongoing and future surveys like eBOSS, DES, LSST, Euclid or DESI . The clustering in the Lyα forest traces the quasi-linear power at late times and on small scales. In combination with observations of the cosmic microwave background, the forest therefore provides some of the tightest constraints on the sum of the neutrino masses. However there is a well-known degeneracy between Σmν and the amplitude of perturbations in the linear matter power spectrum. We study the corresponding degeneracy in the 1-D flux power spectrum of the Lyα forest, and for the first time also study this degeneracy in the 3-D flux power spectrum. We show that the non-linear effects of massive neutrinos on the Lyα forest, beyond the effect of linear power amplitude suppression, are negligible, and this degeneracy persists in the Lyα forest observables to a high precision. We discuss the implications of this degeneracy for choosing parametrisations of the Lyα forest for cosmological analysis.

Neutrino mixing in nuclear rapid neutron-capture processes

A possible mechanism for the formation of heavy-mass elements in supernovae is the rapid neutron-capture-mechanism ([Formula: see text]-process). It depends upon the electron-fraction [Formula: see text], a quantity which is determined by beta-decay-rates. In this paper, we focus on the calculation of electroweak decay-rates in presence of massive neutrinos. The resulting expressions are then used to calculate nuclear reactions entering the rapid-neutron capture. We fix the astrophysical parameters to the case of a core-collapse supernova. The neutrino sector includes a mass scheme and mixing angles for active neutrinos, and also by including the mixing between active and sterile neutrinos. The results of the calculations show that the predicted abundances of heavy-mass nuclei are indeed affected by the neutrino mixing.

The bias of cosmic voids in the presence of massive neutrinos

Cosmic voids offer an extraordinary opportunity to study the effects of massive neutrinos on cosmological scales. Because they are freely streaming, neutrinos can penetrate the interior of voids more easily than cold dark matter or baryons, which makes their relative contribution to the mass budget in voids much higher than elsewhere in the Universe. In simulations it has recently been shown how various characteristics of voids in the matter distribution are affected by neutrinos, such as their abundance, density profiles, dynamics, and clustering properties. However, the tracers used to identify voids in observations (e.g., galaxies or halos) are affected by neutrinos as well, and isolating the unique neutrino signatures inherent to voids becomes more difficult. In this paper we make use of the DEMNUni suite of simulations to investigate the clustering bias of voids in Fourier space as a function of their core density and compensation. We find a clear dependence on the sum of neutrino masses that remains significant even for void statistics extracted from halos. In particular, we observe that the amplitude of the linear void bias increases with neutrino mass for voids defined in dark matter, whereas this trend gets reversed and slightly attenuated when measuring the relative void-halo bias using voids identified in the halo distribution. Finally, we argue how the original behaviour can be restored when considering observations of the total matter distribution (e.g. via weak lensing), and comment on scale-dependent effects in the void bias that may provide additional information on neutrinos in the future.

On the road to per cent accuracy – III. Non-linear reaction of the matter power spectrum to massive neutrinos

ABSTRACT We analytically model the non-linear effects induced by massive neutrinos on the total matter power spectrum using the halo model reaction framework of Cataneo et al. In this approach, the halo model is used to determine the relative change to the matter power spectrum caused by new physics beyond the concordance cosmology. Using standard fitting functions for the halo abundance and the halo mass–concentration relation, the total matter power spectrum in the presence of massive neutrinos is predicted to per cent-level accuracy, out to $k=10 \,{ h}\,{\rm Mpc}^{-1}$. We find that refining the prescriptions for the halo properties using N-body simulations improves the recovered accuracy to better than 1 per cent. This paper serves as another demonstration for how the halo model reaction framework, in combination with a single suite of standard Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) simulations, can recover per cent-level accurate predictions for beyond ΛCDM matter power spectra, well into the non-linear regime.

How to add massive neutrinos to your ΛCDM simulation – extending cosmology rescaling algorithms

ABSTRACT Providing accurate predictions for the spatial distribution of matter and luminous tracers in the presence of massive neutrinos is an important task, given the imminent arrival of highly accurate large-scale structure observations. In this work, we address this challenge by extending cosmology-rescaling algorithms to massive neutrino cosmologies. In this way, a ΛCDM simulation can be modified to provide non-linear structure formation predictions in the presence of a hot component of arbitrary mass, and, if desired, to include non-gravitational modifications to the clustering of matter on large scales. We test the accuracy of the method by comparing its predictions to a suite of simulations carried out explicitly including a neutrino component in its evolution equations. We find that, for neutrino masses in the range Mν ∈ [0.06, 0.3] eV the matter power spectrum is recovered to better than $1{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ on all scales k < 2 h Mpc−1. Similarly, the halo mass function is predicted at a few per cent level over the range Mhalo ∈ [1012, 1015] h−1 M⊙, and so do also the multipoles of the galaxy two-point correlation function in redshift space over r ∈ [0.1, 200] h−1 Mpc. We provide parametric forms for the necessary transformations, as a function of Ωm and Ων for various target redshifts.

Clustering and redshift-space distortions in modified gravity models with massive neutrinos

Abstract Modified gravity and massive neutrino cosmologies are two of the most interesting scenarios that have been recently explored to account for possible observational deviations from the concordance Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) model. In this context, we investigated the large-scale structure of the Universe by exploiting the dustgrain-pathfinder simulations that implement, simultaneously, the effects of f(R) gravity and massive neutrinos. To study the possibility of breaking the degeneracy between these two effects, we analysed the redshift-space distortions in the clustering of dark matter haloes at different redshifts. Specifically, we focused on the monopole and quadrupole of the two-point correlation function, both in real and redshift space. The deviations with respect to ΛCDM model have been quantified in terms of the linear growth rate parameter. We found that redshift-space distortions provide a powerful probe to discriminate between ΛCDM and modified gravity models, especially at high redshifts (z ≳ 1), even in the presence of massive neutrinos.