Weighing Neutrinos with Large-Scale Structure

Abstract

While it is established that the effect of neutrinos on the evolution of cosmic structure is small, the upper limits derived from large-scale structure could help significantly to constrain the absolute scale of the neutrino masses. Current results from cosmology set an upper limit on the sum of the neutrino masses of ~ 1 eV, somewhat depending on the data sets used in the analyses and assumed priors on cosmological parameters. In this review we discuss the effects of neutrinos on large-scale structure which make these limits obtainable. We show the impact of neutrino masses on the matter power spectrum, the cosmic microwave background and the clustering amplitude. A summary of derived cosmological neutrino mass upper limits is given, and we discuss future methods which will improve the mass upper limits by an order of magnitude.