Constraints on the neutrino mass and mass hierarchy from cosmological observations

Qing-Guo Huang; Ke Wang; Sai Wang

doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-016-4334-z

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2023 Impact factor 4.2

Particles and Fields

Open Access

Eur. Phys. J. C (2016) 76: 489
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-016-4334-z

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Constraints on the neutrino mass and mass hierarchy from cosmological observations

Qing-Guo Huang¹^,2, Ke Wang¹^* and Sai Wang¹

¹ Key Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China
² School of Physical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 19A Yuquan Road, Beijing, 100049, China

^* e-mail: wangke@itp.ac.cn

Received: 24 March 2016
Accepted: 20 August 2016
Published online: 6 September 2016

Abstract

Considering the mass splitting between three active neutrinos, we represent the new constraints on the sum of neutrino mass $\sum m_\nu$ by updating the anisotropic analysis of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) scale in the CMASS and LOWZ galaxy samples from Data Release 12 of the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS DR12). Combining the BAO data of 6dFGS, MGS, LOWZ and CMASS with $\textit{Planck}$ 2015 data of temperature anisotropy and polarizations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), we find that the 95 % C.L. upper bounds on $\sum m_\nu$ refer to $\sum m_{\nu ,\mathrm NH}<0.18$ eV for the normal hierarchy (NH), $\sum m_{\nu ,\mathrm IH}<0.20$ eV for the inverted hierarchy (IH) and $\sum m_{\nu ,\mathrm DH}<0.15$ eV for the degenerate hierarchy (DH), respectively, and the normal hierarchy is slightly preferred over the inverted one ( $\Delta \chi ^2\equiv \chi ^2_\mathrm{NH}-\chi ^2_\mathrm{IH} \simeq -3.4$ ). In addition, the additional relativistic degrees of freedom and massive sterile neutrinos are neither favored at present.