English

Measuring neutrino mass and asymmetry with matter pairwise velocities

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2025-08-28 v3

Abstract

Neutrinos are believed to be the most abundant fermions in the Universe, but their masses are unknown, except for being non-zero but much smaller than other fermions. Cosmological relic neutrinos could also have non-zero chemical potentials (or asymmetries). Using neutrino-involved N-body simulations, we investigate the neutrino effects on the matter pairwise velocity, which itself is an interesting probe of cosmology. We find that for light-halo ([1011,1013] M[10^{11},10^{13}]\ M_\odot) mean pairwise velocity, in the transition range ([4,15] Mpc[4,15]\ \mathrm{Mpc}), the effects of neutrino masses overwhelm the effects of neutrino asymmetries, while in the two-halo-group range ([25,50] Mpc[25,50]\ \mathrm{Mpc}), for both light and heavy haloes ([1013,1015] M[10^{13},10^{15}]\ M_\odot), the effects of neutrino asymmetries dominate, making it possible to disentangle the two effects. We provide fitting formulae to quantify the effects of neutrino mass and asymmetry on halo-halo pairwise velocities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2312.04278,
  title  = {Measuring neutrino mass and asymmetry with matter pairwise velocities},
  author = {Wangzheng Zhang and Ming-chung Chu and Rui Hu and Shihong Liao and Shek Yeung},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.04278},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

15 pages, 4 main + 3 appendix figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS; v3: fix symbol typo in Eq. (10)