Abstract: We study the possibility of extracting the neutrino mass ordering at the future Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment using atmospheric neutrinos, which will be available before the muon neutrino beam starts being operational. The large statistics of the atmospheric muon neutrino and antineutrino samples at the far detector, together with the baselines of thousands of kilometers that these atmospheric (anti) neutrinos travel, provide ideal ingredients to extract the neutrino mass ordering via matter effects in the neutrino propagation through Earth. Crucially, muon capture by argon provides excellent charge tagging, allowing us to disentangle the neutrino and antineutrino signature. This is an important extra benefit of having a liquid argon time projection chamber as a far detector, that could render an similar to 3.5 sigma extraction of the mass ordering after approximately 7 yr of exposure.

Abstract: Model-independent mass limits assess the robustness of current cosmological measurements of the neutrino mass scale. Consistency between high-multipole and low-multiple cosmic microwave background observations measuring such scale further valuates the constraining power of present data. We derive here up-to-date limits on neutrino masses and abundances exploiting either the Data Release 4 of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) or the South Pole Telescope polarization measurements from SPT-3G, envisaging different nonminimal background cosmologies and marginalizing over them. By combining these high-l observations with supernova Ia, baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), redshift space distortions (RSD) and a prior on the reionization optical depth fromWMAP data, we find that the marginalized bounds are competitive with those from Planck analyses. We obtain Sigma m(nu) < 0.139 eV and N-eff = 2.82 +/- 0.25 in a dark energy quintessence scenario, both at 95% CL. These limits translate into Sigma m(nu) < 0.20 eV and N-eff = 2.79(-0.28)(+0.30) after marginalizing over a plethora of well-motivated fiducial models. Our findings reassess both the strength and the reliability of cosmological neutrino mass constraints.

Abstract: The simplest models of inflation predict small non-Gaussianities and a featureless power spectrum. However, there exist a large number of well-motivated theoretical scenarios in which large non-Gaussianties could be generated. In general, in these scenarios the primordial power spectrum will deviate from its standard power law shape. We study, in a model-independent manner, the constraints from future large-scale structure surveys on the local non-Gaussianity parameter f(NL) when the standard power law assumption for the primordial power spectrum is relaxed. If the analyses are restricted to the large-scale-dependent bias induced in the linear matter power spectrum by non-Gaussianites, the errors on the f(NL) parameter could be increased by 60% when exploiting data from the future DESI survey, if dealing with only one possible dark matter tracer. In the same context, a nontrivial bias vertical bar delta f(NL)vertical bar similar to 2.5 could be induced if future data are fitted to the wrong primordial power spectrum. Combining all the possible DESI objects slightly ameliorates the problem, as the forecasted errors on f(NL) would be degraded by 40% when relaxing the assumptions concerning the primordial power spectrum shape. Also, the shift on the non-Gaussianity parameter is reduced in this case, vertical bar delta f(NL)vertical bar similar to 1.6. The addition of cosmic microwave background priors ensures robust future f(NL) bounds, as the forecasted errors obtained including these measurements are almost independent on the primordial power spectrum features, and vertical bar delta f(NL)vertical bar similar to 0.2, close to the standard single-field slow-roll paradigm prediction.