Acronym: NEWCLASS
Title: Neutrinos with cosmological large scale structure
Abstract: The values of the masses of the neutrinos are fundamental quantities in physics.
Depending on which are the masses of the neutrinos, some supersymmetric models could be ruled
out, laboratory experiments could distinguish whether neutrinos are Majorana or Dirac and their
impact on cosmology could be small or quite large. Despite the huge efforts from laboratory
experiments, cosmology has raised as the most sensitive and promising way to measure/constrain
the neutrino masses.
We propose running large N-body/hydrodynamic simulations to study systematically the impact of
relic neutrinos in the non-linear regime. This regime has not been fully studied and the impact of
neutrinos in some objects, such as cosmological voids, is expected to be very large. By exploring
this regime, new cosmological observables, sensitive to the masses of the neutrinos, can be found
and can be used to place new, tight and independent constrains on the masses of the neutrinos.
We propose beginning this project by studying the distribution of galaxy peculiar velocities in the
edge and within cosmological voids and investigate its dependence with the masses of the
neutrinos. We will also study the impact of relic neutrinos on the dark matter density profiles of
cosmic voids and use the Fisher matrix formalism to forecast the neutrino impact in future data
sets as EUCLID and SKA. With the objective of showing the community the validity and potential of
measuring the neutrino masses with cosmic voids, we will apply the method described in
(Villaescusa-Navarro, Vogelsberger, Viel & Loeb, 2011) to a catalog of high resolution QSO spectra
to place a new an independent bound on the neutrino masses. We also propose studying the
clustering of neutrinos within galaxy clusters since their effects in those structures can be achieved
using weak lensing.