Neutrino mass from future high redshift galaxy surveys: sensitivity and detection threshold

We calculate the sensitivity of future cosmic microwave background probes and large scale structure measurements from galaxy redshift surveys to the neutrino mass. We find that, for minimal models with few parameters, a measurement of the matter power spectrum over a large range of redshifts has more constraining power than a single measurement at low redshifts. However, this improvement in sensitivity does not extend to larger models. We also quantify how the non-Gaussian nature of the posterior distribution function with respect to the individual cosmological parameter influences such quantities as the sensitivity and the detection threshold. For realistic assumptions about future large scale structure data, the minimum detectable neutrino mass at 95 % C.L. is about 0.05 eV in the context of a minimal 8-parameter cosmological model. In a more general model framework, however, the detection threshold can increase by as much as a factor of three.