TY - JOUR AU - Oldengott, I. M. AU - Barenboim, G. AU - Kahlen, S. AU - Salvado, J. AU - Schwarz, D. J. PY - 2019 DA - 2019// TI - How to relax the cosmological neutrino mass bound T2 - J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys. JO - Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics SP - 049 EP - 18pp VL - 04 IS - 4 PB - Iop Publishing Ltd KW - neutrino masses from cosmology KW - cosmological neutrinos KW - cosmological parameters from CMBR KW - cosmological parameters from LSS AB - We study the impact of non-standard momentum distributions of cosmic neutrinos on the anisotropy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background and the matter power spectrum of the large scale structure. We show that the neutrino distribution has almost no unique observable imprint, as it is almost entirely degenerate with the effective number of neutrino flavours, N-eff, and the neutrino mass, m(nu). Performing a Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis with current cosmological data, we demonstrate that the neutrino mass bound heavily depends on the assumed momentum distribution of relic neutrinos. The message of this work is simple and has to our knowledge not been pointed out clearly before: cosmology allows that neutrinos have larger masses if their average momentum is larger than that of a perfectly thermal distribution. Here we provide an example in which the mass limits are relaxed by a factor of two. SN - 1475-7516 UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.04352 UR - https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2019/04/049 DO - 10.1088/1475-7516/2019/04/049 LA - English N1 - WOS:000466578400003 ID - Oldengott_etal2019 ER -