0000000000396984
AUTHOR
Patrick Crotty
Current cosmological bounds on neutrino masses and relativistic relics
We combine the most recent observations of large-scale structure (2dF and SDSS galaxy surveys) and cosmic microwave anisotropies (WMAP and ACBAR) to put constraints on flat cosmological models where the number of massive neutrinos and of massless relativistic relics are both left arbitrary. We discuss the impact of each dataset and of various priors on our bounds. For the standard case of three thermalized neutrinos, we find an upper bound on the total neutrino mass sum m_nu < 1.0 (resp. 0.6) eV (at 2sigma), using only CMB and LSS data (resp. including priors from supernovae data and the HST Key Project), a bound that is quite insensitive to the splitting of the total mass between the th…
Measuring the cosmological background of relativistic with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe
We show that the first year results of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) constrain very efficiently the energy density in relativistic particles in the Universe. We derive new bounds on additional relativistic degrees of freedom expressed in terms of an excess in the effective number of light neutrinos $\ensuremath{\Delta}{N}_{\mathrm{eff}}.$ Within the flat \ensuremath{\Lambda}CDM scenario, the allowed range is $\ensuremath{\Delta}{N}_{\mathrm{eff}}l6$ (95% confidence level) using WMAP data only, or $\ensuremath{-}2.6l\ensuremath{\Delta}{N}_{\mathrm{eff}}l4$ with the prior ${H}_{0}=72\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}8\mathrm{km}{\mathrm{s}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}{\mathrm{Mpc}}^{\ensure…