Cosmology with High-redshift Galaxy Survey: Neutrino Mass and Inflation

Abstract

(abridged) High-z galaxy redshift surveys open up exciting possibilities for precision determinations of neutrino masses and inflationary models. The high-z surveys are more useful for cosmology than low-z ones owing to much weaker non-linearities in matter clustering, redshift-space distortion and galaxy bias. We can then utilize the two-dimensional information of the linear power spectrum in angular and redshift space to measure the scale-dependent suppression of matter clustering due to neutrino free-streaming as well as the shape of the primordial power spectrum. To illustrate capabilities of high-z surveys for constraining neutrino masses and the primordial power spectrum, we compare three future redshift surveys covering 300 square degrees at 0.5<z<2, 2<z<4, and 3.5<z<6.5. We find that, combined with the cosmic microwave background data expected from the Planck satellite, these surveys allow precision determination of the total neutrino mass with the projected errors of sigma(m_nu)=0.059, 0.043, and 0.025 eV, respectively, thus yielding a positive detection of the neutrino mass rather than an upper limit, as sigma(m_nu) is smaller than the lower limits to the neutrino masses implied from the neutrino oscillation experiments. The accuracies of constraining the tilt and running index of the primordial power spectrum, sigma(n_s)=(3.8, 3.7, 3.0)x10^-3, and sigma(alpha_s)=(5.9, 5.7, 2.4)x10^-3, respectively, are smaller than the current uncertainties by more than an order of magnitude, which will allow us to discriminate between candidate inflationary models. In particular, the error on alpha_s from the highest redshift survey is not very far away from the prediction of a class of simple inflationary models driven by a massive scalar field with self-coupling, alpha_s=-(0.8-1.2)x10^-3.