Abstract: We present up-to-date cosmological bounds on the sum of active neutrino masses as well as on extended cosmological scenarios with additional thermal relics, as thermal axions or sterile neutrino species. Our analyses consider all the current available cosmological data in the beginning of year 2014, including the very recent and most precise baryon acoustic oscillation measurements from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. In the minimal three-active-neutrino scenario, we find Sigma m(nu) < 0.22 eV at 95% C.L. from the combination of cosmic microwave background (CMB), baryon acoustic oscillation, and Hubble Space Telescope measurements of the Hubble constant. A nonzero value for the sum of the three active neutrino masses of similar to 0.3 eV is significantly favored at more than three standard deviations when adding the constraints on s 8 and Om from the Planck cluster catalog on galaxy number counts. This preference for nonzero thermal relic masses disappears almost completely in both the thermal axion and massive sterile neutrino schemes. Extra light species contribute to the effective number of relativistic degrees of freedom, parametrized via N-eff. We found that when the recent detection of B mode polarization from the BICEP2 experiment is considered, an analysis of the combined CMB data in the framework of LCDM + r models gives N-eff = 3.90 +/- 0.42, suggesting the presence of an extra relativistic relic at more than 95% C.L. from CMB-only data.

Abstract: We present robust, model-marginalized limits on both the total neutrino mass (E m1,) and abundances (Neff) to minimize the role of parametrizations, priors and models when extracting neutrino properties from cosmology. The cosmological observations we consider are cosmic microwave background temperature fluctuation and polarization measurements, supernovae Ia luminosity distances, baryon acoustic oscillation observations and determinations of the growth rate parameter from the Data Release 16 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV. The degenerate neutrino mass spectrum (which implies the prior sigma m(1), > 0) is weakly or moderately preferred over the normal and inverted hierarchy possibilities, which imply the priors sigma m(1), > 0.06 and sigma m(1), > 0.1 eV respectively. Concerning the underlying cosmological model, the ACDM minimal scenario is almost always strongly preferred over the possible extensions explored here. The most constraining 95% CL bound on the total neutrino mass in the ACDM + sigma m(1), picture is sigma m(1), < 0.087 eV. The parameter N-eff is restricted to 3.08 +/- 0.17 (68% CL) in the ACDM + Neff model. These limits barely change when considering the ACDM + sigma m(1), + Neff scenario. Given the robustness and the strong constraining power of the cosmological measurements employed here, the model -marginalized posteriors obtained considering a large spectra of nonminimal cosmologies are very close to the previous bounds, obtained within the ACDM framework in the degenerate neutrino mass spectrum. Future cosmological measurements may improve the current Bayesian evidence favoring the degenerate neutrino mass spectra, challenging therefore the consistency between cosmological neutrino mass bounds and oscillation neutrino measurements, and potentially suggesting a more complicated cosmological model and/or neutrino sector.

Abstract: We present neutrino mass bounds using 900,000 luminous galaxies with photometric redshifts measured from Sloan Digital Sky Survey III Data Release 8. The galaxies have photometric redshifts between z = 0.45 and z = 0.65 and cover 10,000 deg(2), thus probing a volume of 3 h(-3) Gpc(3) and enabling tight constraints to be derived on the amount of dark matter in the form of massive neutrinos. A new bound on the sum of neutrino masses Sigma m nu < 0.27 eV, at the 95% confidence level (CL), is obtained after combining our sample of galaxies, which we call “CMASS,” with Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) seven-year cosmic microwave background data and the most recent measurement of the Hubble parameter from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This constraint is obtained with a conservative multipole range of 30 < l < 200 in order to minimize nonlinearities, and a free bias parameter in each of the four redshift bins. We study the impact of assuming this linear galaxy bias model using mock catalogs and find that this model causes a small (similar to 1 sigma-1.5 sigma) bias in Omega(DM)h(2). For this reason, we also quote neutrino bounds based on a conservative galaxy bias model containing additional, shot-noise-like free parameters. In this conservative case, the bounds are significantly weakened, e. g., Sigma m(nu) < 0.38 eV (95% CL) for WMAP+HST+CMASS (l(max) = 200). We also study the dependence of the neutrino bound on the multipole range (l(max) = 150 versus l(max) = 200) and on which combination of data sets is included as a prior. The addition of supernova and/or baryon acoustic oscillation data does not significantly improve the neutrino mass bound once the HST prior is included. A companion paper describes the construction of the angular power spectra in detail and derives constraints on a general cosmological model, including the dark energy equation of state w and the spatial curvature Omega(K), while a second companion paper presents a measurement of the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations from the same data set. All three works are based on the catalog by Ross et al.