English

Comment on "Strong Evidence for the Normal Neutrino Hierarchy"

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2017-03-16 v1 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

In the preprint arxiv:1703.03425 "strong evidence" for the normal neutrino mass ordering is claimed. The authors obtain Bayesian odds of 42:1 in favour of the normal ordering. Their conclusion is based on adopting a flat logarithmic prior for the three neutrino masses. Such an assumption favours a hierarchical spectrum for the masses, which is much easier to accommodate for the normal mass ordering, and hence their prior assumption makes the inverted ordering much less likely a priori. We argue that the claimed "evidence" for normal ordering is almost entirely driven by the adopted prior and not due to the data itself.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1703.04585,
  title  = {Comment on "Strong Evidence for the Normal Neutrino Hierarchy"},
  author = {T. Schwetz and K. Freese and M. Gerbino and E. Giusarma and S. Hannestad and M. Lattanzi and O. Mena and S. Vagnozzi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.04585},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

2 pages, no figures, comment on arXiv:1703.03425