Spherical collapse in $\nu \Lambda CDM$

Abstract

The abundance of massive dark matter halos hosting galaxy clusters provides an important test of the masses of relic neutrino species. The dominant effect of neutrino mass is to lower the typical amplitude of density perturbations that eventually form halos, but for neutrino masses $> 0.4eV$ the threshold for halo formation can be changed significantly as well. We study the spherical collapse model for halo formation in cosmologies with neutrino masses in the range $m_{\nu i} =0.05eV$- $1eV$ and find that halo formation is differently sensitive to $\Omega_\nu$ and $m_\nu$. That is, different neutrino hierarchies with common $\Omega_\nu$ are in principle distinguishable. The added sensitivity to $m_{\nu}$ is small but potentially important for scenarios with heavier sterile neutrinos. Massive neutrinos cause the evolution of density perturbations to be scale-dependent at high redshift which complicates the usual mapping between the collapse threshold and halo abundance. We propose one way of handling this and compute the correction to the halo mass function within this framework. For $\sum m_{\nu i} < 0.3eV$, our prescription for the halo abundance is only $\sim< 15\%$ different than the standard calculation. However for larger neutrino masses the differences approach $50-10\%$ which, if verified by simulations, could alter neutrino mass constraints from cluster abundance.