The effect of massive neutrinos on the matter power spectrum

Abstract

We investigate the impact of massive neutrinos on the distribution of matter in the semi-non-linear regime (0.1<k<0.6 h/Mpc). We present a suite of large-scale N-body simulations quantifying the scale dependent suppression of the total matter power spectrum, resulting from the free-streaming of massive neutrinos out of high-density regions. Our simulations show a power suppression of 3.5-90 per cent at k~0.6 h/Mpc for total neutrino mass, m_nu=0.05-1.9 eV respectively. We also discuss the precision levels that future cosmological datasets would have to achieve in order to distinguish the normal and inverted neutrino mass hierarchies.