Abstract: Axions currently provide the most compelling solution to the strong CP problem. These particles may be copiously produced in the early universe, including via thermal processes. Therefore, relic axions constitute a hot dark matter component and their masses are strongly degenerate with those of the three active neutrinos, as they leave identical signatures in the different cosmological observables. In addition, thermal axions, while still relativistic states, also contribute to the relativistic degrees of freedom, parameterized via N-eff. We present the cosmological bounds on the relic axion and neutrino masses, exploiting the full Planck mission data, which include polarization measurements. In the mixed hot dark matter scenario explored here, we find the tightest and more robust constraint to date on the sum of the three active neutrino masses, Sigma m nu < 0.136eV at 95% CL, as it is obtained in the very well-known linear perturbation regime. The Planck Sunyaev-Zeldovich cluster number count data further tightens this bound, providing a 95% CL upper limit of Sigma m nu < 0.126 eV in this very same mixed hot dark matter model, a value which is very close to the expectations in the inverted hierarchical neutrino mass scenario. Using this same combination of data sets we find the most stringent bound to date on the thermal axion mass, m(a) < 0.529 eV at 95% CL.

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.