Impact of the damping tail on neutrino mass constraints
Eleonora Di Valentino, Stefano Gariazzo, William Giarè, Olga Mena
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-$\ensuremath{\ell}$ observations with supernova Ia, baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), redshift space distortions (RSD) and a prior on the reionization optical depth from WMAP data, we find that the marginalized bounds are competitive with those from Planck analyses. We obtain $\ensuremath{\sum}{m}_{\ensuremath{\nu}}<0.139\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$ and ${N}_{\mathrm{eff}}=2.82\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.25$ in a dark energy quintessence scenario, both at 95% CL. These limits translate into $\ensuremath{\sum}{m}_{\ensuremath{\nu}}<0.20\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$ and ${N}_{\mathrm{eff}}=2.7{9}_{\ensuremath{-}0.28}^{+0.30}$ after marginalizing over a plethora of well-motivated fiducial models. Our findings reassess both the strength and the reliability of cosmological neutrino mass constraints.